#i was? very interested in the notion of a victim of a tragedy being able to express their grief & their loss after their death

[ourfallensister-blog]

#one day i'll make a meta abt how the entire school shooting subplot truly was pointless

okay today’s the day! ten whole seconds later. idk if this is an unpopular opinion, i don’t really care. the school shooting subplot was? one of the 59827925 subplots in this show that absolutely could have been dropped. 

first off, after the halloween ep, we never see the kids’ ghosts again. we don’t see them in the library after violet talks to the librarian. v..iolate doesn’t even actually break up after she learns he shot up a school. like she does kill herself? but honestly i don’t think we needed an entire fucking school shooting subplot & graphic scene for this to happen like. violet’s life is shit. 

second, god does this overkill tate’s character. he’s 1.) set his mom’s boyfriend on fire (justifiable lmao i don’t feel bad for larry) 2.) shot up his school 3.) killed chad & patrick 3.) r*ped vivien and 4.) fathered the antichrist like. ryan? are you aware you can have more than one villain in your horror show? dear g o d. frankly, if they kept in everything but the school shooting out of that list? i wouldn’t complain as much. a lot of them fit tate’s character during the season; he does really shitty things under this guise of helping people he cares about, like nora and beau. this shooting? sticks out like a sore thumb. he says he kills people he likes, to take them someplace “clean”, but we never seen him attempt to kill, say, addie outside of the house so she can go someplace better.

third: like almost every other nod to real life people & events on this show, the westfield massacre is literally ryan showing off how much he “”knows”” (debatable lmao) about history. we get it ryan, you’ve heard of c*lumb*ne (censoring the fuck out of that so the fangirls don’t find me). the amount of kids tate killed is the same amount of children that died during that tragedy; at one point, stephanie says tate asked her if she believed in god, something that turned out not to be true, another detail of the rl case. 

the worst part about this is that there is this dragged out scene at the beginning of episode 6 where we literally? see the shooting in the library in real time. for god knows how many minutes, we have to watch pretend children face the fact they’re gonna die, all while the show is like “hey, it’s just like c*lumb*ne!” it’s nasty, in my pov. and i’ll never get over them censoring the mass shooting scene in cult after the vegas tragedy (a probably wise move, tbh) when that is? not the first time this show has pulled this shit. but c*lumb*ne had happened 12 years before mh, so i guess that was “enough time”, in their pov, to shoot the scene as they did.

[norahastuff]

penny for your thoughts on salmondean codependency ?

Sure. Fair warning it’s long (was longer but I stopped myself.)

I think it’s complicated in a show that’s had so many different showrunners because they’ve all handled Sam and Dean’s relationship very differently. In Kripke’s era (s1-5) there was a romanticization of the bond. Sure there was a lot of in-depth exploration of how they wound up at the place they were at, spoiler alert: it was all because of John and his obsessive crusade to find the demon that killed his wife. That’s all he cared about and as a result, Sam and Dean had to be everything to each other. But Kripke had no intention of dismantling that at any point because he was (and always had been) writing a tragedy. Gamble continued that too. There was no room for anyone else in their lives and it would always just be the two of them against the world. So Cas had to go. Bobby had to go.

(Actually, it's funny because Gamble didn't intend this at the time, her plan was to kill Cas off, but by Edlund creating the masterpiece that is The Man Who Would Be King, he not only saved Cas from being seen as a villain, but he also deepened Dean and Cas' relationship in such a profound way and inextricably linked the two of them emotionally. And since Cas was eventually brought back, that laid the foundation for a lot of what their relationship would become.)

Up until this point, there hadn’t really been any significant dismantling of perhaps the more unhealthy parts of Sam and Dean’s relationship. Enter Carver. He stripped things down and started to explore what drove these characters. What they wanted and why they couldn’t have it. It starts with Dean being mad at Sam for not looking for him in purgatory, which sets up the whole speech in the s8 finale of Sam’s guilt about letting Dean down, but the thing is, Dean was never honest with Sam about his year away either. He never told Sam he could have gotten out much sooner if he hadn’t stayed to find Cas. I mean Dean had assumed Sam was up there alone doing God knows what to try to bring him back, and yet still he stayed in Purgatory because things were clear there. He needed Cas. Anyway, I just find that interesting, but Cas isn’t a victim of Sam and Dean’s relationship in s8.

Who gets the honour of being cast aside? That would be Benny and Amelia, two characters they introduced in s8 specifically to highlight that Sam and Dean’s relationship doesn’t allow for anyone else to be a significant part of their life. I mean that’s nothing new, we’ve watched that happen many times before. Lisa even said as much to Dean. The thing is this time? It’s framed as a truly sad thing. That moment at the end of 8x10 when Dean has just ended things with Benny and Sam leaves Amelia, and they’re sitting alone drinking beer and watching tv is such a hollow empty moment. This is not what they want. But it’s the way things have to be.

I’m actually fascinated by Sam and Dean’s conversation in the church in the s8 finale. Not so much Dean’s assertion that there is no one else he would put before Sam, but more so what provokes it, which is Sam saying “who are you going to turn to instead of me. Another angel? Another vampire?” See the thing is Dean saying he would always put Sam first is not news. We know this and it’s not really an unhealthy statement in itself either. A lot of people would put their sibling above anything else, not less a sibling who you raised and is the most important person to you. But in this context? After what Sam said? It just highlights how unhealthy they are if Sam believes that Dean having other people in his life means he doesn’t love him enough. That he’s a disappointment to him. That’s so profoundly fucked up.

(Note, Dean tells Sam that he killed Benny for him but he doesn’t say anything about Cas. I think like I said before, this is because Cas and Dean’s relationship has largely existed out of the Sam and Dean stuff up to this point - Sam and Cas don’t even really have much of a relationship yet besides both of their connections to Dean.)

And then from here, things start getting steadily worse. But we also keep being shown how bad they are. Dean lying to Sam, taking away his free will by letting Gadreel possess him. Dean sending Cas away, Kevin dying. It’s all awful. The whole “there ain’t no me if there ain’t no you line” from 9x01 isn’t really said by Dean, it’s Gadreel, but that is how Dean feels. He does think that’s all he’s good for. And over the season we’re shown how much of himself and what he truly wants he’s had to give up because of his ingrained “Save Sammy” and “Sammy comes first” mentality. It’s always been this way for him. In 9x07 we see that he had found a happy home, a good father figure, and his first love, a first love might I add that he had to leave behind with no real explanation because Sam needed him, and Sam comes first.

I mean just one episode earlier we had him rushing out the door elated about seeing Cas and spending time with him, only for their time together to come to sad and melancholic end when Dean once again leaves Cas behind without any real explanation, because despite what he wants Sammy comes first. What he wants doesn’t matter.

See I think after the Gadreel stuff comes out is where the narrative starts to get a little wonky for me. You can clearly see that this was intended to be a shorter story that they ended up stretching out to a much longer one because of renewals. There’s also the fact that this is a formula show so they can’t necessarily be separated for longer than an episode or two. S10 is a rough one to get through at times, I think the themes still mostly hold up but it’s a rough one to get through.

S10 highlights all the connections that Dean has, Cas, Charlie, Crowley even, but Sam doesn’t really have those bonds in the same way.  For Sam it’s just Dean, so he goes down a reckless destructive “do anything to save Dean!” path and so many innocents pay the price, and ultimately with the release of The Darkness, the whole world.

They skirted right up to the edge of exploring just how toxic and dangerous their relationship had become in the season 10 finale.

DEAN: I let Rudy die. How was that not evil? I know what I am, Sam. But who were you when you drove that man to sell his soul... Or when you bullied Charlie into getting herself killed? And to what end? A..a good end? A just end? To remove the Mark no matter what the consequences? Sam, how is that not evil? I have this thing on my arm, and you're willing to let the Darkness into the world.

I can’t say evil is the right word, they were never evil, but they were wilfully blind to everything and everyone else when it came to saving each other. S10 tested my love for the show because after watching it, because there was certainly a feeling that the two of them had become the villains of this story. And don’t get me wrong, I didn’t have a problem with that, it’s just after 2 seasons of this I can’t say I had a lot of faith that this was going to be properly addressed or if we were going to keep going in circles around it. Keep being shown, it’s bad and then nothing much being done to fix it. Your mileage may vary on how it was handled, but I think s11 did a relatively ok job considering it wasn’t the end of the story, and the show needed to keep going.

See from Dean’s side a lot of the codependency rests on 1. His father’s orders to always save Sammy 2. His low self-esteem where he sees himself as nothing but a blunt instrument. 3. His guilt at not being able to perfectly fulfil every familial role in Sam’s life 4. His belief that no one could choose to love him but family has to love you. 5. The unhealthy example of what it should look like to love someone that he got from John. You give up everything but them.

For Sam (and honestly it’s not as clear for me as Dean’s side is so feel free to correct me/disagree on this) 1. Everytime he’s tried to leave and create his own life it’s never ended well. 2. His guilt over wanting freedom and a normal life when he was younger (I’m referring specifically to Stanford era here) 3. His guilt over everything Dean has given up for him. 4. John. 5. Jess.

Ultimately it all comes down to isolation. They both had to be everything to each other, and the deeper they got into this fight, the more people that they lost, the tighter they clung to this notion of family and brothers. I think s11 (and 11x23 in particular) was an important turning point, both for Sam and Dean’s relationship, as well as for them as individuals. Because they weren’t alone there anymore. Cas was there. Sam let Dean walk to his death. Of course, it would devastate him, but he knew it was what had to be done. And he didn’t walk out of that bar and go back to the bunker alone. He had Cas, he had someone who cared about him and wanted to help him and talk to him. Sure Dean asked Cas to take care of Sam for him (you know after Cas offered to walk to his death with him) but Sam let him. He let him be there for him. We didn’t get to see much before the BMOL showed up and blasted Cas away, but still, we saw enough.

I think that’s a significant difference to note why their relationship was different in the Dabb era. It wasn’t just them anymore. Cas was an important member of their family and given a level of importance he’d never been given before and couldn’t have been when the story they were telling was of the dangers of their codependency. Mary was back. Eventually, Jack would become a part of their unit too. Just the two of them wasn’t enough for them anymore. This is made abundantly clear with all of Dean’s desperate attempts to get Cas to stay in s12, followed by his inability to keep going when they lose Cas and Mary in s13. Similarly, Sam really struggles when they lose Jack and fail to get Mary back later in the season.

Another big moment is Dean letting Sam go alone to lead the hunters against the BMOL in 12x22 while he stays back to try and reach Mary. Like he tells Mary, he’s had to be a brother, a father and a mother to Sam and he never stopped seeing him as his kid, but in that moment he makes a choice. He lets Sam take charge and he shows that he trusts him and believes in him. He knows he can handle it.

Sometimes it’s not even a character growth thing. Sometimes having other people there stops you from making destructive choices even though that’s still your first instinct. I’m thinking specifically of 13x21 after Sam was killed. Dean would have run headlong into that nest of vampires and got himself torn apart, but Cas was there to stop him. He was able to make him see reason.

Basically, I think that for a long time, they thought the only relationship they could have was each other, which then became a self-fulfilling prophecy because their desperate attempts to keep each other around led to them losing the people around them. They eventually started to learn that that wasn’t true, they could have more, they were allowed to want more, and that it wasn’t an either-or situation. Dean didn’t have to choose between Sam and Cas. They didn’t have to choose between each other or Jack. The same goes for Mary. Different relationships can coexist without threatening each other, and not say that their relationship in s12-15 was all smooth sailing, but it was certainly so very different from everything that came before.

(There’s maybe a point to be made about how they didn’t have anyone or anything in the finale and how that relates to the story we got, but honestly I have no idea what the intention was with any of the choices made in that episode so I’ll leave it at that for now.)

[dahlia-coccinea]

What’s your opinion on the main characters in WH (like one for Nelly, one for Catherine etc)? Do you have a favourite and a least favourite?

There are a lot of main characters...I guess Nelly Dean, Heathcliff, Catherine Earnshaw, Cathy Linton, Hareton Earnshaw, and Linton Heathcliff? I feel bad cutting out Edgar and Isabella, they are important characters but I could easily write a thesis on each character and I don’t want to make this unbearably long (you’re going to regret asking me this as it is lol).

Nelly - She is not the “sensible soul” that she esteems herself to be. Compared to other characters she may seem discerning, but that’s partially because she’s just a witness to events that more deeply affect other characters. She can be very biased towards and against certain people, and her opinions tend to be fairly rigid. Her actions and convictions seem more an unconscious exhibition of societal norms of the time and her station in life; rather than her objective rational thinking. She certainly isn't immune to common superstition and small-mindedness. That being said, she is not the villain of the novel as critic James Hafley argued. She certainly isn’t heartless and cruel and she is motivated to do what she believes is the right thing to do. Overall I like her character.

Heathcliff - It's a testament to the complexity of his character that there is such a wide range of narratives on him…some I admittedly don’t understand. While a powerful force in the novel, I think he shows himself to be very human and fallible, and not the “ghoul” or “vampire” he is sometimes accused of being. It makes me laugh how many times I’ve seen critics say he is the human embodiment of the Heights but the first meeting of him it's literally said that he is a “singular contrast to his abode”? It’s also strange that his physical nature is often questioned by critics that reduce him to an elemental symbol, yet I would think Catherine is a better candidate to say she is more symbolic since we first encounter her in a dream and she is merely a memory/ghost in half the novel. Not to mention that throughout her life she displays a fixation on the spiritual and divine (not that I think she is symbolic either). I think he’s meant to be read as a human, not a devil or a symbol, and it makes it more interesting to read him as such. He can be sarcastic and witty and also utterly devoid of humor. His pain and loss is tragic yet his anger and hatred is fearsome. He plans to enact revenge over decades and (kind of) succeeds yet he also is so short-sighted and often misjudges characters and situations. He’s a villain and a victim and never plays either part in exactly the way you’d expect. Despite all this, he never feels inconsistent or out of character. 

Catherine - I’m such a broken record on her lol. We get a lot of negative opinions about her from Nelly but everyone else loves her? So I think it’s worth questioning what Nelly says about her. I don’t agree with popular narratives that exaggerate how terrible she is. She is certainly proud, quick-tempered, and her strong, unrelenting nature is unique for any character and even more so for a woman. These traits also make her Heathcliff’s natural counterpart, although she is never cruel in the way he can be, and she doesn’t seem to enjoy that side of his character either. I think audiences/readers often forget the better parts of her character, such as her love for her father regardless of his constant admonishments, her love of Heathcliff despite his harshness and his wrongdoings, and her brother Hindley in spite of all his cruelty. The tragedies of the novel are not her fault as it has sometimes been suggested. 

Hareton - It is interesting his character probably has the most physical descriptions and I’d say is the most flatteringly portrayed male character. Yes, he starts off being described as brutish by Lockwood, but we later get many moments showing he also has a gentleness. His faults are normally immediately shown as not wholly his doing and I’d say he has the most character growth, even more than Cathy. Cathy’s appearance gets a lot of mentions too, but because Lockwood is kind of a romantic and in a faraway, lonely place, it makes sense that he projects a lot of romantic notions on her. We don’t need to know that Hareton is good-looking but it’s certainly made known lol. I think it’s in part because Cathy’s and Hareton’s good nature are meant to be shown as desirable and Nelly certainly makes an aesthetic connection there in her descriptions of them. I really like his character, and how despite everything, and his initial pride, he tries repeatedly to help Cathy, even though it does nothing in gaining her good opinion and only puts him at odds with Heathcliff, who he sees as a father. He also shows that you don’t have to be the product of your upbringing.

Cathy - I really like how she tries to do the right thing and is good, yet doesn’t allow anyone (even Heathcliff) control her. She has faults but she’s able to grow from them. She also has a lot of similarities to her mother. For both Cathy and Hareton, I really dislike the idea that their move to Thrushcross is the symbolic win of culture over nature. That’s never made any sense to me and makes even less sense when you consider that Emily preferred nature, and the freedom and spirituality she found there, and not riches and formality. And after all, Cathy and Hareton are the successors of Catherine and Heathcliff. I can’t imagine they will become supremely refined, cultured, and gentle. Everyone forgets they are both wild and proud, and at their worst, they both physically hit the other - Cathy cuts Hareton with her whip, and years later Hareton hits her. This notion of their new domesticity comes from the narrative of the Heights = wildness and Thrushcross = respectability and progress, and I’ve mentioned before this also distorts our image of Isabella and mislabels her as a weak, refined, gentlewoman, even though she shows herself to be highly spirited. Sorry, got a little off-topic at the end there. I think they can forgive and learn to be kind to each other without equating it to them becoming genteel and upper-class. I don’t like that critics do this. 

Linton - I get why he’s no one’s favorite character but I don’t hate him. He is tragic, despite the fact that he also very annoying and bratty lol. I understand why he doesn’t care to better himself, and it seems pretty clear his behavior is a cry for the safety and affection that has been missing in his life since his mother died. He’s a pawn in a game he doesn’t understand, and yet he’s very aware of his role as a pawn and that his life will be short and its meaning and worth are ascribed inasmuch as he can prove useful. It’s understandable that he would cling to Cathy and her kindness to him. Of course, some of his sufferings are his own making. It seems he could less lonely if he was perhaps a little kinder to Hareton who doesn’t seem to have a preconceived dislike of him but is pushed away by Linton’s snobbishness. 

Favorite: That's a really difficult question. The simple answer is I love them all hah! It does change, but I do often go back to Catherine Earnshaw. Charlotte Bronte wrote that there is a “certain strange beauty in her fierceness” and I think that sums it up perfectly. The fact she dies tragically young and the closest we get to her as a narrator is the little bit of her diary Lockwood reads, and that her memory lives on so strongly with Edgar and Heathcliff, all make her a compelling figure. The fact that so many readers hate her also makes me like her more lol. 

Least favorite: Everyone always says Linton and Joseph are the worst so I’ll say Zillah because she doesn’t get picked on enough lol. She literally didn’t realize Nelly was being held hostage and instead believes some bullshit story about her being lost in a marsh and assumes Heathcliff saved her?? She was terrible to Cathy - granted she had been proud and stiff-necked but she was clearly being held against her will? Like is Zillah just not at all aware of her surroundings? She doesn’t get Dr. Kenneth when Linton is dying and instead leaves Cathy alone crying in the stairway, supposedly out of fear of losing her job if she disobeys - yet she didn’t seem worried about that when she puts Lockwood in Catherine’s old bedroom? She also knowingly embarrasses Hareton when he shyly asks her to ask Cathy to read aloud for him - she immediately says that Hareton is the one asking for it. Zillah is just one of those people that has no self-awareness and no consideration for others beyond her self-preservation. So yeah she wins the spot of “least favorite” lol. I’m not sure if you meant my least favorite of the main characters? If so then it would have to be Linton just cause no amount of sympathetic feelings towards him makes him less annoying lol sorry. 

[diyunho]

The Joker x Reader - “John Wick” Part 3

Y/N left The Organization 3 years ago for the one reason strong enough to make her settle down: love. But after tragedy crushed her to pieces, she decided to leave The Joker and seek refuge with an old friend and mentor - John Wick. Needless to say The King of Gotham can’t accept his wife running away without a word, especially since he didn’t have a chance to tell her things she might want to hear.

Part 1     Part 2

The Joker listens at the bedroom’s door, impatient to have a conversation with you. It seems you are engaged into a fervent phone call with Winston and figured he shouldn’t interrupt.

“Please, anything you can discover would be a great help! U-hum… U-hum… Thank you,” and you hang up, which queues your husband to walk into the room.

You completely ignore him, scrolling through the numerous text messages you sent to your connections; several are already answering back and hopefully you can get some news soon. The more people are involved into the project, the more chances to find Kase and untangle the mystery of what happened to him after he was removed from the car.

“You left me there,” The Joker sneaks in and closes the door behind him. “Luckily we had Wick with us so he gave me a ride.”

No reaction. He takes a deep breath, trying to get your awareness.

“I didn’t sleep with Evelyn; sex wasn’t the reason why I kept visiting her. I know how that asshole made it sound and he was totally out of line!”

You quickly glance at him, busy replying to Ares since you feel you’re going to explode soon.

“The only skill I was interested in is the fact that she is an excellent painter and a popular art smuggler, OK?” J raises his voice, sort of annoyed you neglect to participate into his monologue. “I did not cheat, alright?” he approaches his wife. “First of all: I’m VERY picky! Second of all: why would I want a woman everyone else had?! I don’t like used toys. Third: nobody’s been polishing my gun as you tastefully addressed the issue! I have one Queen and I married her!!”

A little bit of doubt in your eyes and he utilizes the opportunity.

“You said you saw me going to her house? I did! The Bowery King asked if it was for the last 6 months? Yeah, I did! You know why?!”

At least now The Joker got your attention: you play it cool but he guesses you’re torn apart by his confession.

Many unfortunate events crammed in lately and hating the man you love made life infinitely more unbearable.

“Why…?” you barely muster the strength to inquire and he sees it as a possibility to mend a few broken pieces; although you can hide your emotions well, J can still read between the lines.

Maybe that’s why he answers with another question:

“Do you realize there are just three Monet paintings in circulation on the black market in the entire world? You admire his work and it took a lot of effort and a substantial fortune to acquire The Water Lily Pond painting. Evelyn Black helped with the transaction, then I had her make some modifications to the original masterpiece.”

You keep staring at The King of Gotham, uncertain about the stuff being tossed your way: is he lying or telling the truth?... In your line of work translating feelings is a huge part of the job; ultimately you had the best mentor to teach you the ropes when you started with the organization: none other than the legendary Baba Yaga. Despite his reputation and to your own amazement, John was one of the few hitmen with integrity and perfectly mastered the aptitude of not being a jerk. Such a rare gem… And blissfully unaware of it himself.

On the opposite end, The Joker is a jerk and flawlessly acquainted with his own “captivating” personality that made you fall in love with him anyway.

Also, doesn’t appear to be deceitful for the moment.

And you despise yourself even more for wanting to believe him.

“What… modifications?...” you throw him a bone and J is definitely not going to pass on the alternative of explaining his actions.

“I wanted to surprise you so I took advantage of Miss Black’s capabilities in the art field; I had her add small images to the authentic canvas: an evolution of you being pregnant, the nine frames culminating with a tenth: the new mother holding our son. Similar to a timeline,” he emphasize and you look intrigued, which might be a positive sign. “Needless to say it was tedious, difficult work, especially because she had to apply special pigments you can’t find at every corner of the street. Apparently you can’t mix old paint with contemporary shades, thus I had to order aged, special colors from Italy, Spain and France. That’s why I went to her place so often: I had to supervise the long process and make sure it turns out astonishing. Then…” and The Joker pauses,”…Kase was gone and I didn’t know what to do with my gift: bring it home or not? Would you have loved it? Would it make you sadder? I continued to drive to Evelyn’s and glare at the stupid painting for hours, undecided on what to do…”

J watches you bite on your cheek, then straightens his shoulders as you utter the words:

“… … … You ruined a genuine Monet?”

Your spouse might be a smooth talker when needed, yet he’s not wasting his versatility on this statement:

“I didn’t ruin it; I made it better!”

Silence from both parties. A good or bad omen? Hard to decipher the riddle with two individuals tangled into a relationship that somehow worked despite countless peculiarities meant to keep them apart.

“I have to talk to Jonathan,” you finally mutter and The Joker steps in front of you.

“Talk to me!”

“Unless you know the exact location of the suitcase full of gold coins he’s been safekeeping for me, I really have to speak to him. Or do you want to hammer the whole basement searching for it?”

Y/N walks out of the bedroom and J lingers inside, evesdropping on the conversation happening downstairs. He can’t understand the chat, but you are probably notifying John about the details your husband left out.

Might as well join the party, therefore The Clown pops up in the living room with a plea impossible to refuse:

“Hey Wick, can I stay here? I don’t care if you say no, I’m not going to leave.”

Your friend crosses his arms on his chest, focusing on the random topic:

“How could I deny such a polite request? Of course you can stay Mister Joker; my house is your house.”

You’re watching the free show unamused; usually it would make you smile…now you lack the depth for such connotations.

“Don’t get smart with me, Wick!” J growls and Jonathan pushes for a tiny, unnecessary quarrel.

“I’m not; although generally speaking, I fancy considering myself a smart guy.”

The Joker opens his mouth and you’re not in the mood for whatever the heck they’re initiating:

“I’m going to pump, then after you dig out the suitcase I’ll take half to the Bowery King,” you announce your plans to them.

“You can do that and rest; I’ll deliver the coins,” John immediately offers. “I can stop by Aurelio’s car shop and ask for his collaboration: he has a lot of associates, doesn’t hurt to get him involved. You have plenty of gold.”

“I have two more suitcases in the Continental’s safe and two more at The Penthouse. It doesn’t matter if it’s all gone as long as I can find my son.”

“I know gold coins are preferred; don’t forget we have a lot of money too,” J reckons with spite.

Is he reminding you or Jonathan?...

*************

Your husband spent the last hour in the garden, talking and texting with a lot of people; needless to mention he’s capitalizing on his network also. Winston disclosed Stonneberg’s contract is still opened, meaning the son of a bitch is out there; you have to scoop him before anybody else does.

“Y/N…” The Joker tiptoes in your quarters. “I thought you were taking a nap,” he huffs when he sees you at the edge of the bed.

You glare at the vial on the nightstand, sharing your idea for a future you wish will come true:

“I didn’t have my medicine in two days; I won’t take it anymore because if we get Kase back… I will nurse him. It all goes in the milk and I want to be able to feed my baby… Do you think his little heart is still beating?...” you sniffle and J is currently debating on a clever response since his mind is blank; one could deduce messing up is encoded in his DNA, but on such a huge scale… well, it gives new interpretations to the term even for him.

The grieving woman seeking reassurance for their loss is trying to make sense of the pointless occurrences that lead to Kase being an innocent victim and The Joker can’t render clarification: he has no clue why he asked her to marry him and why she said yes, it’s not that he’s husband material or a family man. Perhaps Y/N thought he could be… just enough to get by, that’s why she accepted his proposal.

Most women would have cringed at the concept. Most women. Not Y/N.

Most women would have flinched at the notion of having his baby. Most women. Not his wife.

Above all, she trusted J with their son and he treated the three weeks old like a trinket: didn’t drive him home because he had an important meeting, didn’t bother to assign escorting cars nor extra security. The King of Gotham took his child’s safety lightly and it definitely had severe consequences. Too late now to fix past mistakes... but he can attempt.

“You’ll be able to nurse him, OK?” he sits by you and hands over his cell. “Can you enter your phone number in here? Or am I not allowed to have the present digits?”

You’re hesitant and he slides the screen while you hold the gadget.

“Lemme help you,” The Joker sarcastically mumbles. “It should be the first on my list, right where the old number you canceled was.”

You exhale and fulfill his demand out of pure frustration when he squeezes in a second innocent petition.

“Chose my avatar.”

You grunt at his rubbish, scrolling through his folders for a picture anyway; J hopes the largest file will get your attention and that’s the point. How could Y/N miss it?!

Entitled “Baby”, the humongous cluster of pics contains 5,723 items. You open it quite absorbed by its size; what’s more puzzling is the collection depicting Kase’s ultrasounds, hundreds of frames with you being pregnant taken without you knowing: there’s a few when your ankles were so swollen you had to sleep with your feet up on 4 pillows, others with you munching on strange food you craved, more with you in the shower focused on your bump, a decent amount of couple selfies when you were sleeping and J had to immortalize the moment without waking you up and approximately 1,500 images of the newborn.

“You didn’t gross me out when you were pregnant,” The Joker reminds a teary Y/N. “Not sure why you would believe such aberration...” he pulls you on his knees and yanks the phone away, tossing it on the nightstand. “I would also like to underline I didn’t have an affair with Miss Black, alright?”

J lifts your chin up, forcing to look at him.

“Let’s put it this way: why would I fuck around with another woman when I have a wife at home that wants to kill me on a regular basis, hm? Where would the fun be? I mean, she didn’t pull the trigger yet but it’s exciting to hope she might. You know me: I’m a sucker for thrills!”

“Do I?”

“Huh?” J steals a kiss and you frown at his sleekness.

“Know you?”

“Yeah,” the green haired Clown acts composed while in fact his feathers are ruffled. Before you catch onto it he has to ultimately admit: “I’m sorry I didn’t drive the car… I should have…”

The Joker holds in his breath when your arms go around his neck very tight.

“I’m suffocating…” he grumbles. “I can’t tell if you’re trying to hug me or choke me to death,” J keeps on caressing your hair, prepared to block your attack in case you’re actually in killing mode.

This is the excitement he was speaking about: with you, one could never know until it’s a done deal.

“I bumped into Magnus at the Continental,” you give him a bit of space to inhale much needed air and The Joker is surprised at your revelation. “I had no idea about his scheme, otherwise I would have skinned him alive right on the hotel grounds! I wouldn’t have cared about the consequences!”

“I’m glad you didn’t,” J cuts you off and he can tell you’re getting mad; maybe you think he doesn’t give a damn but the reason is simple. “You would’ve been declared excommunicado for murder on neutral ground and I don’t want my wife to be the target of such punishment from the company she so proudly retired from. I need my partner!”

The King of Gotham touches your forehead with his as you whisper:

“I hate you!”

“Mmm, regarding this true love affirmation, I’m gonna need you to take a break from detesting me until we have Kase, then you can despise me full throttle again. Deal?” he extends the palm of his hand and you reluctantly shake it, not realizing you’re reacting to his nonsense. “Is that a smile?” J returns the favor with one of his creepy silver grins.

“No.”

“Liar,” he pecks your lips and can’t explain the weird feeling in his heart when you kiss him back.

*************

Jonathan enters the house and becomes suspicious after a few minutes: too much silence.

Omg! Did you and The Joker engaged into a brawling that ended up badly? Did you end each other?!

John frantically runs to the garage, nervous to see your car and J’s are still parked inside. Shit!

“Y/N?” he shouts, concerned about your fate; The Joker’s… irrelevant. Nobody in the garden, patio is empty also. Downstairs is deserted thus he rushes upstairs to your room. The door is not completely shut and he slowly pushes it, knocking.

“Y/N? Can I come in?”

The first thing he notices are clothes scattered on the floor, then he halts his movement at the sight of Y/N and her husband dozing off on the bed sideways: the naked bodies are covered with a blanket, but he can tell you’re snuggled in J’s arms.

Jonathan steps backwards, guilty of invading his guests’ privacy; he certainly didn’t expect to intrude in such a manner and softly closes the door, grateful it’s not what he feared.  

You and The Joker are so worn out the sound of your phones vibrating on the nightstand doesn’t wake you from the deep sleep. Your numerous contacts keep replying back to the text messages, the most important one showing up on his cell: one of the people J reached to is Evelyn Black and the two sentence conversation lights up the screen.

“Let me know if you see Stonnenberg.”

“He’s here.”

 Also read: MASTERLIST

You can follow me on Ao3 and Wattpad under the same blog name: DiYunho.

[tenaflyviper]

Not a strange question at all!

The allure of splatter and gore is a very tricky question, and difficult to explain—especially when we’re currently seeing an unwelcome resurgence of the oft-debunked, conservative, and antiquated notion that violent or “problematic” material is a direct cause of violent, transgressive, and antisocial behavior (and not, you know…the result of negative or lacking human contact during one’s formative years, victimization, trauma, economic hardship, dysfunctional environments, and the myriad of other possible contributing factors that birth violent individuals). Forgive me for this intro, but it has become harder to discuss gory films without touching upon this issue.

Violence—particularly in America—is a deeply-rooted cultural issue that can neither be easily solved, nor easily attributed to one particular cause. Placing the blame for violence on violent media is little more than scapegoating: A way for people to feel accomplished without ever addressing the root of the problem. When a few isolated individuals consume a piece of media and choose to emulate it, they are held up as evidence of causation, conveniently ignoring the millions upon millions of people who consume the same exact media, yet never cause harm.

So, what is the appeal of gore?

Well, one must first address whether the gore in question is only that on the silver screen. Personally, I have a low tolerance for real images of viscera. As a teenager, I saw my fair share out of morbid curiosity online, but that curiosity was sated, and no longer of interest to me. I still research and curate “shockumentaries” and “mondo” films, but more because of their relation and importance to the history and evolution of horror films.

As human beings, I suppose we are inherently curious about what goes on inside our own bodies, because it’s something that we cannot easily see. The inside of our own bodies is plagued by taboo.

We cannot take a knife, slice ourselves open in a few places, and investigate—it would cause us great personal pain and suffering. However, when you clip your toenails or pick off a scab, you might often take a moment to “play with” the resulting clipping or flake. Why? It was a part of you. It came off of your body, and now is available to be seen. You couldn’t get a great look at it from every angle while it was on you, but now you are able to, and so your curiousity gets the better of you, and you examine.

Another factor contributing to the popularity of gory films is disgust itself. Researcher Bridget Rubenking may have put it best in a study published in the Journal of Communication,

“Disgust, it is argued here, makes us feel bad—but it has functionally evolved over time to compel our attention, thus making it a quality of entertainment messages that may keep audiences engrossed and engaged.”

Simply put, if it disgusts us, it holds our attention. We also remember such scenes more than those following or preceding them, so it’s actually in the financial interest of filmmakers to occasionally rely on gore as a gimmick.

For people like me that have an interest in film itself, I am impressed with the skill and artistry involved. I am particularly attracted to older films that utilized practical effects (even if they’re not particularly realistic), because I enjoy seeing what the effects crew were able to accomplish. I also personally like more outlandish fare that explores possibilities and situations one wouldn’t find on liveleak. Monsters, aliens, body horror; What would it look like if you started turning into an insect, a plant, or even a clown? What if bizarre things started growing inside you? What if biology went haywire, and you became filled internally with hair?

We aren’t normally able to view blood or viscera without being party to pain or tragedy, and the things listed above have no basis in reality. Film serves as a medium to allow the public to experience vicariously those things we cannot experience in real life; oftentimes, things that we would never even want to. It is a valuable way in which we can recognize and come to terms with the darker aspects of life, as well as the darker side of our imaginations.

[sethnakht]

Rambling thoughts on Cass and on ending stories. 

THE WICKED + THE DIVINE #32, written by Kieron Gillen, art by Jamie McKelvie, colors by Matthew Wilson, letters by Clayton Cowles

This panel sort of has it all.

Spoilers beneath the cut.

If there's only one way to end a story, and that way is to stop telling it, will it be enough for Laura to have rejected godhood? Or will the other surviving gods, including the heads, need to follow her example to ensure that Ananke cannot complete her ritual?

One can imagine Baph being convinced; he never wanted to die, never had a choice, and this would return some choice to him. Cass as well - the hospital footage on Dio's phone might even suggest that she survives past all this into old age. But what of Baal, who has always believed he was a god? Who has sacrificed in belief? Sunken cost fallacy there. Asking this of the heads - even of those who never wanted this - would be a tall order, moreover - for without godhood, what would they be other than victims of decapitation and thus dead? (Not that they would last long as heads under Minervananke.) Or was Ananke telling the truth when she said the children would develop powers on their own without her - where powers is not equal to the trappings of the god she chose for each, where the latter can be rejected as story and the former involves discovering identity of a sort?

In this context, I've been thinking a lot about Cass.

Cass interests me because of her fraught relationship to stories. She is constantly subjected to bigoted, racist, transphobic, objectifying stories imposed on her about gender and ethnic roles, not least by members of the Pantheon like Amaterasu and Woden. She is a critic who sees through that bullshit. She's defended her own story and gathered tools of defense. She's a journalist who wants to expose truths.

She's also someone who wants change in the form of progress and who seems to have once thought the gods would be the answer, if her academic degree in Pantheon Studies is any indication. But the gods of this Recurrence are themselves mouthpieces for the very same BS she has been subjected to all along. No change she would consider meaningful is taking place; instead we get the eternal recurrence of the same. When the gods speak in tongues, Cass is told she should feel something and yet does not. There is a story that her body and mind should be a certain way being imposed on her once again.

Cass rejects this narrative. The gods are not saviors, they're entitled teenage pricks. Their powers are meaningless. How she understands this exactly is a bit unclear to me. Does she think that the gods have never effected any meaningful change over the course of history, that their presence has had no effect? That would be a strange position for an academic historian. It seems more likely that she rejects the idea that the presence of the gods is inherently meaningful, that their appearance points to a deeper meaning in the structure of the world. The fact of Recurrence would itself be as meaningless as a meteor striking earth, for instance - the presence of the gods would mark no portent, no messianic coming, but simply be a fact of nature.

The stories about meaning imparted by gods - she says this with the portraits of 1831 Woden (Mary Shelley) and 1831 Lucifer (Lord Byron) in the background, possibly also referencing any sort of aestheticism as such, any sort of idea that art as such is a replacement for political action - were therefore lies.

THE WICKED + THE DIVINE #2, written by Kieron Gillen, art by Jamie McKelvie, colors by Matthew Wilson, letters by Clayton Cowles

For Cass, “the personal is the political”. (I tend to think of her as the opposite of idk the long-nineteenth-century German notion of Kultur writ large, but that's another story.)

Cassandra wants to change the world. That makes her position is VERY different from that of David Blake, whose problem with the Recurrence seems to also be that the current Pantheon reflects a society he doesn't want. Where Cassandra seeks a progressive future - her choice of name for herself speaks volumes - Blake acknowledges that the patriarchy is bad because: war and because: not every man gets to be the father with all the benefits, but also doesn't seem to care to change the status quo. On the contrary, some of his remarks suggest that he thinks culture was superior in the Past and that the Present should be violently struck from the history books. Even after Cass ascends to become Urdr, and thus associated with the Past, her thoughts remain directed towards the future. "We're trying to give birth to the future using the language of our oppressors", she tells Dio:

THE WICKED + THE DIVINE #27, written by Kieron Gillen, art by Jamie McKelvie, colors by Matthew Wilson, letters by Clayton Cowles

Ananke, Cass tells Laura, is "god of fate". Cass is the naysayer who doesn't believe in fate. In a perverse move, Ananke makes Cass into a goddess of fate. Cass is the sort who takes any thesis you give her and represents the anti-thesis with a "fuck you". Made goddess of fate, her response is to use those powers to persuade an audience of her view that there is no fate. The gods are a false hope and offer no meaning: "The void swallows us. Nothing means anything. Everything is nothing. Meaning is irrelevant. It's so cold. It lasts forever. It's all there is. So small so alone. We only have each other. It's never enough."

This is kind of a Birth of Tragedy moment: man gazes into the void, sees the horror of life, realizes nothing has meaning, and is paralyzed from action. Nietzsche thinks the paralysis can be overcome with art, particularly when the principles of individuation (the Apollonian drive) and inclusiveness (the Dionysian drive) are fused in a way that moves us to see past our own individual selves and figuratively unite with a collective. Cass is very Apollonian in a sense - she's tremendously restrained, a storyteller as opposed to a dancer and musician; that line about "small" and "alone" also stresses individuality. It's no wonder Dionysus is in this Pantheon and in love with Cass, and even briefly able to make her connect with his hive-mind. But Cass pulls out almost as soon as she starts to feel it, claiming there are more important things to do. There won't be the kind dialectic reconciliation of their respective art drives that Nietzsche would claim to be necessary in this story, unless Dio isn't really braindead.

My point with all this is that if you read Cass' message as something to live by, it seems rather one sided and incomplete. Is there a message she isn't sharing?If nothing means anything, why bother to perform? Cass doesn't go beyond the negation of meaning to think about what to do with that, how to live with that; there's a sense in which she does what she previously criticized about the tongues by not doing more than imposing a story, by not showing how to move beyond a story. She doesn’t ask her audience to think, but to download.

Cass tells a story of meaningless that is received as a story and nothing more. Much to her disappointment, it doesn't effect the kind of instant change in people's attitudes and mindset that she seems to think art should be capable of if it is to have meaning.

THE WICKED + THE DIVINE #10, written by Kieron Gillen, art by Jamie McKelvie, colors by Matthew Wilson, letters by Clayton Cowles

Instead of being provoked into thinking, or paralyzed with realization, however, what happens is quite a bit worse: her audience treats her message as a product to be consumed. Cass is again subjected to this fate when she decides to forgo the use of tongues - of giving any sort of aestheticized pleasure to her audiences - and hold a normal press conference where she yells unvarnished truths. Not only are her words ignored - the press conference is turned into reaction gifs to be reposted and repurposed without any attention paid to the original context or meaning - she herself is reframed as dangerous for even attempting to displace Woden's reigning narrative that pleasure is meaning and meaning is meaningful no matter how it was gotten or who it happens to keep in power. Not only is Cass' meaning deliberately twisted in Beth's video / power grab, the Valkyries are openly praised for stunning and imprisoning her and the other Norns.

Is Cass herself nothing more in the story than a tool for thinking through what art has possibly become in the culture industry on a meta level? That would be disturbing. I want to believe the story will give her more, that the raft of friendship we see her building with Laura is not about to be dashed to pieces and writ as futile as Dio’s last act.

The comment to Dio about trying to give birth using the language of oppressors seems really important. One of the literal oppressors in the story is Ananke, the perverted mother, the one who kills children and the future to ensure her own continued survival. (Palpatine and Cylo arguably also play this role in Gillen’s Vader comic, the former by scheming to replace his apprentice/figurative child with younger children in order to extend his power, the latter by endlessly cloning himself.) Ananke lives by a story and she thinks the story will carry her on. She murders the children born of the gods both literally and figuratively, ensuring she remains the only child.

If Ananke's language is that of the oppressor - and if Ananke’s sister stands for desire, she herself apparently stands for necessity - Cass uses that language by negating it. Cass' negations are at times absurdly absolute. When Amaterasu - her anti-thesis in so many ways - tells her that everything happens for a reason, she counters with the absolute: nothing happens for a reason.

THE WICKED + THE DIVINE #15, written by Kieron Gillen, art by Stephanie Hans, letters by Clayton Cowles

Cass is right about Amaterasu in a lot of ways. Amaterasu basically seems to be saying that Hiroshima had to happen so that she could happen. There’s a line in Marx about history repeating itself twice, once as tragedy, once as farce. Amaterasu recreating an artificial sun over Hiroshima was not in the least funny. Everything happens for a reason is a convenient philosophy if history has largely been on your side. 

It's also rather determinist in a way, attributing necessity to everything regardless of how it affects people. Which makes Amaterasu's claim that Cass is an idealist who doesn't care about what happens to people rather rich:

THE WICKED + THE DIVINE #15, written by Kieron Gillen, art by Stephanie Hans, letters by Clayton Cowles

Amaterasu’s words are echoed later and more effectively by The Morrigan, who claims that her own choice to take away Baph’s choices was essentially the same as Cass’ choice to transform her girlfriends into Verdandi and Skuld. Cass protests that it was the logical, almost mathematically rational thing to do, which ... isn’t a great response ...

Speaking of idealism, Cass seems to impress Woden as well with the idea that she is a foolish idealist, whatever that means:

THE WICKED + THE DIVINE #30, written by Kieron Gillen, art by Jamie McKelvie, colors by Matthew Wilson, letters by Clayton Cowles

To say that nothing happens for a reason is not an idealistic statement by itself, though. If there's an ideal attached to it, it might be freedom - rejection of determinism. At the same time, Cass is certainly not an advocate for anarchy, as the vote on the Great Darkness makes clear. Cass thinks there is a right way to do things and a wrong way. If she believes that nothing happens for a reason because the idea of an inherent purposiveness to the world is a lie or a story we tell ourselves, her ideals also suggest that stories are part of who we are, that we are storytellers, that our minds are configured to see cause and effect, and that there is purpose to reflecting on what we are so we can do something with that. “I’m seeing patterns, but they’re the patterns I see” is a problem of which she is aware. There may not be meaning "out there", and that creates doubt - but it doesn’t keep her from doing.

Which makes it kind of a head-scratcher for me that neither Amaterasu nor Cass seem willing to acknowledge is that both of them can be right. We know this because Jon Blake - Mimir, a god of wisdom - puts forward a middle position:

THE WICKED + THE DIVINE #34, written by Kieron Gillen, art by Jamie McKelvie, colors by Matthew Wilson, letters by Clayton Cowles

It’s ironic that Cass, who claims nothing happens for a reason, is the one to fall for the idea that Ananke's machine must have a purpose, that it must do work. The machine does have a purpose - it misleads the gods, and above all, it has a purpose beyond its intended purpose, in that it keeps Cass inside, isolated, and distracted. Cass’ labor is sucked into the machine for the purpose of keeping the masses satiated and unthinking (Woden) and the perverse cycle of child murder uninterrupted (Minerva). The point being - someone had reason to hide the truth, just as she had reason to find it, and the recognition that stories are lies we tell ourselves for the purposes of survival doesn’t magically reveal truths or serve as an antidote or solution to the problems of society.

In this story about storytelling, this story about the meanings we choose to believe (“the personal is the political”, which full disclosure is also something I also believe), to act upon, to share or impose on the world and other people, the position that “nothing happens for a reason” is a difficult sell. Everything in this story was meticulously plotted, and any unintended effects on the reader can still be attributed to reasons. Given that the story is coming to an end in a very literal sense for both the reader and the characters, given that their story is to end a story, I’m really looking forward to seeing how Cass’ negations and ideals, how her approaches to art and stories are developed. 

[alwaysalreadyangry]

due south: the ladies man (redux)

In the fall of 1998, I was a student of Derrida’s in his seminar at The New School for Social Research, “Justice, Perjury, and Forgiveness.” Despite the ambitious title, Derrida’s singular focus that semester was forgiveness. He was particularly interested in the notion that to be pardoned or forgiven is only actually meaningful in the face of the unpardonable, the unforgivable. To forgive someone for a minor mistake, or to say “pardon me” when accidentally bumping into a stranger on the street, is perhaps a nicety, a well-meaning mannerism or gesture, but where forgiveness is really needed — where it actually changes human relations — is where (and when) it is given to the unforgivable. In this way, the power of forgiveness depends upon the unforgivable.

Since then, I have maintained a correlated interest in the acceptance of the unacceptable, in the toleration of the intolerable, pairings that indicate a deeper problem; deeper in the sense that humans regularly accept the unacceptable (unlike forgiving the unforgivable). People regularly accept theoretically changeable facts of the world that are, even by their own accounts, totally unacceptable. Adjustments and acquiescence to unhappiness and dissatisfaction are common expectations of a practical life of “doing what one has to do,” and yet, it remains a basic ethical instinct to say that we should not accept a life that does us and others real measurable harm — at home, at work, in school, in society. And yet we regularly do. We do, that is, until there is a revolt against the unacceptable, against the intolerable.

richard gilman-opalsky, specters of revolt

this is an interesting section in the introduction to the book i’m reading. the book is mostly about revolt and its possiblities -- both the possibility of revolt haunting the capitalist world, but also the possibilities of what revolt can do.

but i think there’s something interesting in this passage -- and as someone who really struggles with derrida that’s not something i expected to find myself saying. after these two paragraphs, gilman-opalsky starts talking about revolt. which i am also interested in. but i do find myself thinking about the moments before. all the unforgivable moments before. before revolt; when revolt is a ghost, a potential body rather than a real physical force. and then i also think a lot about the idea that forgiveness given to the unforgivable has the power to change human relations.

which all relates back to my meta on what the ladies’ man in due south says about law enforcement and the US “justice system”.

because the bit i was struggling with the reading of the most was: the scene between beth botrelle and ray kowalski at the end of the episode. it’s not that i found it hard to reconcile it with the rest of the episode; on an emotional sense i understand why that scene is there. it’s about the system, not him. she understands... and also, it’s him facing a final, impossibly hard emotional truth. and... it’s ray giving the crime scene back to her, and making it back into a personal tragedy. or the scene of the crime done to her.

but on a craft sense; or on an ideological sense, i wondered exactly what the final embrace between them was saying. ray apologising multiple times; beth botrelle hugging him, and kissing him on the cheek. it’s a brutal, beautiful moment; why?

so i’ve been talking with @zielenna about this episode, and one of the other things that came up was the way in which it talks about masculinity, but especially through this very male police hierarchy. all of the cops around and especially above ray are men. the woman he has to fight to exonerate and her lawyer are both women -- and this is not a coincidence. no, it’s very much about patriarchal systems... the patriarchal arm of the state and the ways in which masculinity & homosocial relations are used to keep men in line, to keep them as enforcers of it.

there’s something also interesting that the dead guy is a male cop -- and a male cop who is named, in the episode’s title, as a “ladies’ man”. no, not a ladies’ man. he was “the ladies’ man”. there’s something there about virile masculinity, about how men admire other men who treat women badly.

and so when ray dissents from the ways in which the basic instinct of the police force is to cheer the woman’s execution, to bray for her blood (dewey operates here as a stand-in for the force at large) -- there is a sense in which that can be seen as a rejection of these structures of male power. by which i don’t mean that i’m reading ray as a radical feminist. but if we’re thinking about human relations, and the act of changing them at a time of emergency (and this episode is absolutely about a state of emergency), then it bears teasing out. he is absolutely rejecting a system of male power and personal relationships that intersect with and help strengthen this power. 

this episode gives us a male mentor for ray kowalski, who up until now has had very little past beyond his family and ex-wife. a workplace mentor; a mentor who pretends to be supporting ray as a friend, but is actually out to save his own skin and consolidate his own power, his own power-network. 

this is important; it shows us the figure of ray in a long line, in a huge interconnected network of men who will let this sort of thing happen. and it also shows the ways in which personal relationships between men will be used to strengthen this network; and the ways in which women and those who are outside and marginalised by the network... can and will be crushed by it.

ray’s only one link; when he consciously shatters that link, the network doesn’t fail. but he is able to save one person, in the face of this huge monolith.

so, let’s look at beth botrelle. in the first scene we see her in, her lawyer reinds her that she does not have to see ray. she can turn him away. not only does she choose to see him -- she insists that it’s alone, one-on-one. no lawyer, no fraser. it’s a personal connection. two people who can’t forget each other; and two individuals in a system that’s out to crush one using the other.

then there’s this:

Beth: So, you're looking for forgiveness? [Ray still does not meet her eyes.] Ray: Is that what you think?

ray does not ask for forgiveness. she doesn’t give it. what she does do is try to give him some kind of easy absolution, or a way to clear his conscience. “any cop could have taken that call,” she says. but ray knows that. and then she tells him that she killed her husband; and as soon as she says it, ray is certain that it’s not true. so she hasn’t given him absolution, or forgiveness. in lying, she has given him the truth -- or some portion of it.

let’s contrast this with the end of their final scene:

Ray (softly): I'm sorry. Beth: No. Ray: I am. I'm so sorry. Beth (tearfully): No. [She cups his face with one hand, then kisses his cheek.] Beth: Thank you, Officer Kowalski. [They embrace.]

there is one constant; beth botrelle is saying “no” when ray apologises, taking the responsibility upon himself. this isn’t so different to the way she tries to absolve him earlier. only, in the earlier scene she gives him all the cop platitudes she knows from her husband -- anybody could have taken that call, don’t let it wear on you. she lies. she is all give, willing him to take what she’s offering.

but it’s false; ray hasn’t done anything to earn it. he doesn’t take it; he can’t take it. she is the prisoner, and he is the cop. she’s an incarcerated woman, he’s the man whose role as a cop put her there. and not only is she incarcerated, she’s being touted everywhere as a “cop-killer” -- the people the system hates the most, because they have targeted the officers of that very system. even if, as beth botrelle didn’t, they did no such thing. despite beth asking that they be alone together, they can’t change the nature of their relations to each other.

in the final scene, everything has changed; except nothing that happened to beth has been taken away or removed. she still lived through an atrocity; she still had eight years of her life stolen from her. and that is -- unforgivable. both in the basic sense that it’s an awful, unimaginable thing that has happened to her. that has been done to her. but it is also unforgivable in the sense that she can’t forgive it; it’s impossible to grasp the totality of it, and all of the different people and systems and -- nodes in the network of power that created her fate. she can’t forgive it because they are not all there, it’s impossible to face them all. and it’s also unforgivable, specifically with ray kowalski, because he was one part of the larger system which failed her -- and not all of it. he is complicit, but he is not the root of the corruption.

does this make sense? i find myself doing that old essay trick of looking up the different, interconnected meanings of the word “forgive”. forgiving debt, giving up resentment towards -- and then. to pardon an offender.

because beth was thought to be an offender; she wasn’t one. because it’s the system and the state that can forgive offenders, and beth is a victim (a survivor) of the state’s violence. because ray did not commit an official offence against her; because those that did (the higher-up law enforcement officials) are not there. for all of these reasons, too, she is not able to forgive ray. because of the systems they exist within; because of the systems that shape their lives, and how they relate to each other.

and also just because of the unimaginable, horrifying scope of what was done to her, the way in which her life was destroyed.

so what does she do? she thanks ray. she kisses his cheek. she embraces him. this is not the words “i forgive you” -- and in fact, in the use of the repeated “no” we see her trying to absolve, rather than forgive. the idea that you have nothing to be sorry for equals i don’t need to forgive you.

but the first thing she thought ray was there for was forgiveness. and the last thing she does is she thanks him, and embraces him. a gesture of love; a gesture that nobody could have expected, a gesture that nobody outside the situation could perhaps easily understand.

so, i’m not a derridean, and if you’ve made it this far then you’ve probably guessed that? i’m not good with theory and i’m sure the phrase “human relations” has had a lot written about it (without even getting into the idea of forgiveness). but i’m not backing out from this now. in this passage, we see derrida’s ideas that forgiveness matters most in the face of the unforgivable; that this is when it is a radical act that can change human relations, which i read as relations between humans.

is her thank you and embrace -- forgiveness? is it absolution? does one have radical power that the other does not? or do both have a radical power in the face of all that has come before this moment? we have seen ray splintering the network that he was part of, that other male cops were trying to coerce him to remain committed to. and here he is, to a certain extent, cut loose from that. he is a person, again. alone with another person. 

knowledge of the past power relations haunt this scene -- and of course there is still a power imbalance between them, even now. things have changed, but they have not changed enough. ray did all that he could; he is no longer slumped over in a chair in a prison. he has done something. he has changed something.

and it’s not enough -- because nothing could be enough. forgiveness is impossible. but in the face of the power relations that both hold them still, and haunt them, we see a radical act; an embrace. tenderness. halting, emotional honesty -- contrasting with the comforting lies she tells in the earlier scene. in the face of this system, which can perhaps only be saved by its total destruction, by revolt, by a radical, collective act -- this is what can be done to change power relations. an embrace. a few words. it’s not quite forgiveness; he still does not ask for forgiveness. he does not ask; she bridges the gap. personal tenderness; two people, who are trying to live as best as the world will let them. who are trying not to be defined by the roles in which their relative positions of power would have them. embracing in a way that is not about desire, or about one person’s power over another; embrace as transmission of emotion, empathy, understanding. when i started writing this, i thought it was forgiveness. i don’t think it is forgiveness; i don’t think it’s less of a gesture on beth’s part for that. because --

it’s not enough, and it’s not enough. of course it’s not enough; between two people in this situation, enough is not possible. between any amount of people in this situation, enough is not possible, because the atrocity was already committed. what is so upsetting, the reason why ray cries, is because her tenderness with him is not justified, is not reasonable. the maybe-forgiveness, the attempted-absolution. she can’t give it; and yet she gives it, or something like it. ray has done all that he can, and he does not deserve what she is giving him in return. what she is giving -- an act of love -- is radical in a way that he can’t answer in kind. which is why it’s so beautiful, which is why it’s so sad.

ray can’t be forgiven because he’s not responsible; and he can’t be forgiven because he was complicit. it’s a double-bind. and in the face of that knowledge; love. understanding. thank you. gratitude. 

at the end, it’s gratitude. what is gratitude? kind words said, in earnest, in response to an imbalance -- in response to kindness, specifically an act of kindness which creates an imbalance between two parties. but here, the imbalance is insurmountable. the gap is so wide. it can’t be breached

the words fly tenderly across that gap anyway. thank you.

and so we have ray crying in his car -- we return to that image again. and of course there is so much more to be said about masculinity; about the ways in which it has been shed, and changed by ray’s relationship with beth. this is what a change in human relations means, this is what it can look like. so i have to end on it. ray, sobbing, unconsoled. 

what is unforgivable cannot be forgiven; but that doesn’t mean it’s not a radical act to try.

[stdio2020]

see 14:15

Kirin J Callinan has always been an interesting figure for me, while I have enjoyed plenty of his music, it is his personas and multiple presentations of self that has consistently intrigued me. Kirin’s musical persona rides a wave of other australian artists such as Alex Cameron who are using their public image as a way to interrogate the multiple facets of hegemonic masculinity in the west. Their characters are often over the top, violent, macho, and obviously insecure and tender. Many narratives confess scumbag behavior and ultimately reveal the pathetic and weak nature of this archetype of male. This doesn’t function to apologize for or excuse the behavior of these men but to expose the comedy and tragedy underlaying this behavior, as well as exposing the structures in place that facilitate this mode of being. 

Kirin however, goes deeper in this investigation though the utilization of characters and personas that in some way defy the norms of this male Archetype. Frequently flamboyant and androgynous, the persona put on by Kirin is highly considered. 

In this interview with Anthony Fantano Kirin explains his rationale: 

Q: “There seems to be a notion that you are a legitimate purveyor of toxic masculinity. From anybody that observes what you do, even casually, you don't seem to be a person that embraces a traditional aesthetic or ethos of masculinity at all. Where does this idea come from that you’re this kind of man’s man toxic machismo guy? 

A: I’ve always been a very androgynous, effeminate, and fluid individual. And that’s what I think became quite boring for me to explore artistically, what seemed interesting was thinking back to the hyper masculine environment in high school, growing up in Australia. I must have been called f*ggot daily as a teenager and as a young man. Especially as a cross dressing, gender fluid person. Not that I’ve ever seen myself as a victim at all. On my debut studio album ‘Embracism’ it was quite interesting to me to explore these masculine ideas and to play that kind of character, so, barking into the microphone...Walking a sort of line that was both hyper masculine and effeminate or sensitive which I think i do naturally. I know who I am and what I represent and frankly no one else needs to. 

Later in the interview Kirin clarifies that he is a “straight white guy” so I take his positions with a grain of salt but I found this approach kind of interesting. The idea of prodding and pushing of boundaries that have been imposed upon you , even if you are comfortable within them, will always seem like a valuable experience.  Im reminded of a time when two friends confronted me saying that I am making Gay art even though I’m straight. This really threw me. The work I was making at the time so (to me) so obviously exposed my confusion surrounding my sexual identity.  They took it to be grotesque and satirizing gay love, to me it was a matter of reconciling the violent imposition of gender stereotypes on my being-with the new and uncomfortable feelings of uncertainty surrounding my sexuality. It is important to be prodding and challenging my fencings for both personal and political reasons. 

Sexuality and gender are nebulous, as are our own sense of selves. I dont find the insistance that one should be able to apply a label of categorization to oneself in order to be accepted by the queer community as particularly productive. Postmodern and post structuralist though (which goes hand in hand with much of queer theory) teaches us to work against these ideas of binary signifiers. Therefore we should accept all aspects of fluidity and diversity across the spectrum of self identification as valid and productive. What use is there in adhering to the same binary thought we agree to work against? 

ps. Of course these labels are important for communities in order to find safety and solidarity where there might otherwise be harm but this should not also be a violent act of gatekeeping 

[perfectirishgifts]

The Prerequisite For Healing The Nation: A Federal Job Guarantee

New Post has been published on https://perfectirishgifts.com/the-prerequisite-for-healing-the-nation-a-federal-job-guarantee/

The Prerequisite For Healing The Nation: A Federal Job Guarantee

An original Work Projects Administration sign from the 1930’s. The WPA was a huge part of the New … [] Deal during the Great Depression. Sign set on a blue/gray background. Canon 5D.

This is normally the time of month when I post commentary about the latest economic data, particularly the Employment Situation Report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (speaking of which, unemployment inched down again, however less than expected). But I’m not sure that’s very important right now. We all know what’s happening: at the beginning of the year, the measures required to stem the tide of COVID infections caused post-World War Two highs in unemployment. As restrictions were eased, so unemployment fell. However, the winter months in the Northern Hemisphere are already bringing on new challenges and things may well get worse before they get better. But get better they will, it appears, as vaccines are starting to become available at this very moment.

While this is all very serious and newsworthy, there’s no mystery here that requires an economist’s perspective to unravel. I therefore decided to shift gears this month and talk about a broader issue, one that existed well before COVID and which has contributed materially to the deep political divisions in American today: the increasing income inequality that has marked the US economy since the 1970s.

While I normally avoid taking sides and instead focus on laying out the cause-and-effect of economic forces (I’m going to tell you how the car works, but where you drive it is up to you), this time I can’t do that and still make my point. So here is my stance: those who believe that there was massive election fraud, that science is left-wing propaganda, that the Democratic Party is full of socialists and pedophiles, and that wearing a mask is an unconstitutional infringement of their personal freedom (and a stepping stone toward requiring all American women wear veils—yes, I have heard that)–they’re wrong. More than wrong, they’re dangerous. Their views are undermining the very soul of US democracy. It has to stop.

How did this situation evolve? Obviously, something this deep-seated and complex is not monocausal. A lot is going to have to happen to fix it because a lot happened to cause it. But I am prepared to argue that there is a necessary prerequisite to getting us back on the road to civility and respect for logic and evidence: reversing the above-mentioned trend of increasing economic inequality. Until all Americans feel safe, secure, and part of a system that works for them, Joe Biden can preach unity until he’s blue in the face and it will make no difference.

The effects of unemployment, poverty, and income inequality are widespread and pernicious. Studies link them to increased rates of suicide, mental health issues, drug and alcohol use, spouse and child abuse , and even violent extremism. Victims tend to blame themselves, as does the rest of society. This can put people into a downward spiral that leads to precisely the kind of anger, conspiracy-theorizing, and scapegoating we see today.

Again, I don’t mean to suggest that this is the only factor involved. The specifics of how these maladies manifest themselves is a function of the society in question and the historical context. I am also not saying that it is only the poor and disenfranchised who believe that there was mass voter fraud, etc., nor that they are all of the same mind. Taking Weimar Germany as an example of a polarized society—where demonstrations and street fighting had been going on since shortly after the end of World War One—not only did those most affected by the economic collapse vote both both Nazi and Communist, but they were joined by some wealthy and middle class voters as well, whose anxiety was linked not to their immediate fortunes but to their fears for Germany’s future. One can see parallels today.

Perhaps the key takeaway from the scholarly literature regarding what happened in Germany is this:

“the elections that put Adolf Hitler in power are subject to the same ordinary voting behavior explanations as are most other democratic elections worldwide…if we are interested in the likely reactions of voters and parties, we may want to focus more on governmental successes and failures in choosing and implementing public policies than on the degree of intellectual versus demagogic appeals of the candidates.”

In other words, dismal conditions are far more important to creating extreme outcomes than the nature of the candidate’s message because socio-economic conditions drive the attractiveness of a candidate’s platform. Hitler’s speeches would have fallen on deaf ears in a Germany that boasted low rates of unemployment and high levels of income. Hence my thesis that reconciliation in America can only take place if we can return to a more inclusive and prosperous economic landscape.

How do we achieve this? The core of any successful plan must include a government job guarantee, a promise to American citizens that if you want to work but can’t find a job, you can always find employment in the public sector. If that sounds like FDR’s New Deal, there’s a good reason for that: it’s very much like it, except on a much larger and permanent basis.

There is absolutely no reason to expect the private sector to provide employment for every willing worker. To business, labor is a cost to be minimized. Fair enough, it’s not their responsibility to reduce unemployment and it is by this process (given several other caveats) that they are able to offer products with low prices. But, add to this the employment-reducing forces of automation (which has apparently accelerated during our current crisis) and the outsourcing of production and it’s little wonder that we have seen a diminishing middle class and increasing rural poverty.

However these are not by any means insurmountable obstacles. We have, after all, plenty of food, shelter, clothing, and more for all Americans. That’s not the issue nor has it been for decades. The problem is jobs, or the means of securing the income necessary to take your share of the food, shelter, and clothing off the shelf. That problem can be solved with a job guarantee and here is what we have to do to make it happen:

STEP ONE: Stop confusing the market with the economy.

The former is only part of the latter, albeit a very large one in our society. However, even in our own recent history we have shifted gears very rapidly toward public sector, non-market solutions when we thought it necessary. In 1941, unemployment was still almost 10% (it had been 14.6% in 1940). By 1943, however, it was 1.9% and it fell to 1.2% the next year. What was responsible for this remarkable turnaround? The fact that after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the US started a massive government jobs program called World War Two.

The magnitude of this reversal of economic fortunes was staggering and while there was rationing, this had to do with the fact that strategic materials were being diverted to the war effort. Without that, if the economy had been geared toward increasing the well being of domestic citizens, then there would, indeed, have been a chicken in every pot. And note that this isn’t promising people the moon or something for nothing, it’s guaranteeing them a share of the output we could already have produced for them but they could not afford. Now they can.

STEP TWO: Recognize economic and social problems as no less significant than war.

Unfortunately, it appears that we, as a society, are only willing to employ our economic resources in the manner suggested above when there is a war. That we will not do so in response to social or economic calamity is a tragedy and a source of shame. No one asked, “Can we afford it?” after Pearl Harbor; instead, they thought, “How can we afford not to?” As we saw just this fall, however, that has most certainly not been the case in response to the massive economic disaster caused by coronavirus. All this despite the fact that the US cannot possibly be forced to default on debt in its own currency.

STEP THREE: Change our definition of a “job.”

While there are exceptions, there seems to be a default understanding of “job” as being something that makes a profit for someone; or, at the very least, there is an implication that private-sector jobs represent the most worthwhile undertakings. We need to rid ourselves of that notion. There are separate, distinct, and complementary roles for the private and public sectors and each has a key role. The private sector should do things that are profitable, regardless of the social benefit, while the public sector should do things that are of social benefit, but unprofitable. Profit-derived jobs are not inherently better or more difficult or more praiseworthy than those that are not. Indeed, were we to rely exclusively on the profit motive, we’d leave undone things like national defense, educating the poor, caring for the infirm, combating climate change, police and fire protection, lawmaking, disaster response, etc, etc. And yet these are essential for a civilized society and they underpin our ability to actually carry out the market jobs. And they are what the job guarantee would create.

Furthermore, we need to reconsider what a job is. If you stay at home to care for your children, are you creating a burden on society or contributing to it? Likewise for those caring for sick or elderly relatives. To reiterate a point made above, we have the ability to make food, shelter, clothing, and more for everyone. A job guarantee makes sure they get their share and that we are able to address social problems that the market ignores.

STEP FOUR: Find a political party willing to support such a program.

Unfortunately, neither political party appears to have this seriously on their agenda. Early in his presidency, Donald Trump mentioned it, but that went nowhere. Imagine if that had already been in place when COVID hit! Nothing about what is going on now is simple, but we most certainly would not have found ourselves hoping that a $1200 check would last until December. Nor is Joe Biden a fan . Rather, it appears that he is counting on the private sector to create a job for everyone who willing. That’s a losing proposition when labor is a cost to firms. Furthermore, the private sector will never address critical but unprofitable social problems like climate change. It appears that Joe Biden hasn’t moved past Step One yet.

Long story short, we can absolutely be better off in terms of national divisiveness in four years. The question is, who is willing to take up the cause backed by policies that will actually work? So far, the answer appears to be no one, but we can hope.

From Leadership Strategy in Perfectirishgifts

[longforgottenunofficial]

Here Comes the Bride, Part Four: Constance, Hat Boxes, and the Meaning of The Attic

(Photo by Jeff Fillmore)

Warning label.  We're going to get pretty heavy here before we get light, but you'll get no apologies from me.  I happen to believe that people always and everywhere keep talking about the same old things, whether they're writing big, thick theology books or scripts for situation comedies.  Stupid jokes or philosophical systems—it doesn't matter.  We are all natural born theologians and moralists, and darn it, we just can't help ourselves; everything we discuss with each other echoes into and out from something vast and serious.  No matter how trivial and superficial we think we are being, Deep calls to Deep (Ps 42:7).  Connie will show up some paragraphs down, but if what goes first is not your cup of tea...well, no doubt there's a blog out there dedicated to hidden Mickeys in the Haunted Mansions.  Google, and go in peace.  Rest assured that there will be another installment of "Here Comes the Bride" to deal with some of the interesting inspirations for Constance and even some intimations of her future. It's all good. The current incarnation of the attic bride is a unique and ambitious attempt to swell the Mansion's cast of characters and expand and solidify its backstory.  No longer is the HM simply a retirement home for ghosts from all over the world, brought here by invitation but getting stuck in the fabric of the house itself until Madame Leota fixes the snag so that they can materialize and start schmoozin' and boozin'.  Until now, this basic plot has been the only backstory to the HM that could claim official sanction, and indeed it accords with what the Ghost Host tells you and accounts for most of what you see.  But it has never completely covered the phenomena presented.  For example, the Ghost Host has a further tie to the house.  (The other end is tied to his neck.)  What's with that?  Was he an owner at one point?  That would explain why the hosting duties fell to him, and perhaps the retirement home idea was his, but it suggests that the house had its own haunted history before that. The other thing that suggests a previous history is the attic.  Attics are places of concealment, of hidden horrible secrets.  Moreover, the attic has always functioned as the asterisk on the big Marc Davis joke.  The first thing to do is make it clear what that joke is, because that joke accounts for 90% of the HM.  That joke is the broad, firm base from which other, smaller things may deviate. As we saw in an earlier post, at first you think the ghosts are malevolent and out to get you, but it turns out that "they pretend to terrorize" and really don't care about you at all; they just want to get to a state of comfortable materialization so that they can enjoy themselves.  Ha ha, the joke's on you:  you thought they were hostile, and you were wrong. The point of the joke, the moral of the story, the message of the Mansion, is that fear of death is overblown. That's it in a nutshell.  I mean, you really don't know if it's a chamber of horrors on the other side of the veil, do you?  No one really knows, right?  Perhaps the scary hauntings you hear about are just naughty pranks, perhaps all is forgiven and all is well and everyone's having a jolly good time over there.  So long as you don't know which is the case, you might as well take the optimistic view.  That's the vision presented to you by Mr. Davis.  In his portrait of the afterlife, the executioner and the knight he dispatched are now best buds.  There is no revenge, no bitterness, not even any residual hierarchy of power on the other side of the grave—kings and queens are playing like children!  Yeah, there are those two duelists still going at it, but it's more a matter of both of them being humorously stuck in a cycle of irresolvable earthly business than a tragic vision of implacable hatred.  You almost suspect that they're doing it as a game now.  After all, what happens when a ghost shoots a ghost?  Is he going to die or something?  See?  Joke!  Ever'body laugh. Without going even deeper than we need to, we might briefly note that there is a certain resonance between this joke and traditional Christian theology, wherein Death is defeated and rendered harmless ("where is thy sting?"), and ultimately the story of the universe is told as a comedy and not a tragedy.  In this sense, the Haunted Mansion is simply expressing an optimistic hope firmly rooted in Western culture.  "All shall be well." Okay, now the asterisk, now the "yes, but."  Equally part of the Western and Christian worldview is the notion that the afterlife is also the place where justice is finally served (it sure as hell ain't on this side of the veil, in case you hadn't noticed).  Justice implies judgment, and judgment is bad news for the bad.  That happy optimistic vision hopes that enough mitigating circumstances will ultimately be found so that everybody, or almost everybody, gets off, but if the wisdom of the ages is given any weight, there remains a residual pool of those who choose evil without any possible excuse for it and put themselves beyond the reach of even the most generous of post-mortem visions. Disney traffics heavily in traditional fairy tales, correct?  You'll note that the villains in fairy tales are often very villainous indeed.  It might sometimes be possible to understand them, but you cannot excuse them.  They have made their alliance with Death.  You cannot redeem them; what you do is, you kill them.  In truth, the world of traditional fairy tales is pretty stark and grim, and Disney has always faithfully represented this fact.  Fairy tales are also a good place to check out the aforementioned wisdom of the ages.  It's not surprising that Davis's warm bath of good feeling has a sober asterisk attached. The HM is just complex enough to give a nodding acknowledgment to this darker truth while celebrating the rosier vision.  This could have been accomplished in a number of ways, but the route the Imagineers chose (by intuition—don't ever think I'm claiming that they sat around and thought about all of this consciously), is the detective mystery.  What is it that motivates the sleuth in all of those whodunnits?  Bringing the criminal to justice.  Making sure the guilty party doesn't get away with it.  You don't associate Sherlock Holmes with forgiveness, do you?  Now ordinarily, writers of detective fiction banish the supernatural from their pages.  That's because the readers are supposed to be able to figure out who did it based on clues dropped along the way.  If you throw angels and demons and ghosts in there, it spoils the whole thing.  No one can reasonably be expected to anticipate a deux ex machina resolution to a mystery.  But the reverse is not true:  crime and detection are not absent from ghost lore.  Too many ghosts busy themselves with revealing where the body is hidden, or where the knife was buried, or by terrorizing the guilty into confessing their crime.  These ghosts, at any rate, are not in a forgiving mood.  They want justice. In our discussion of the Hat Box Ghost, we showed that the whole attic scene originally was held together by the head-in-a-hatbox symbol, which hails from the world of crime mystery.  You're in the attic, which is one of the two places in an old house where horrible secrets and crimes are hidden (the other is the cellar, of course).  You see that hatbox, and you have a dreadful suspicion that there's a severed head in it, and when your suspicion is confirmed, you realize you're looking at a murder, and you wonder what happened and who did it.  Like a good murder mystery, the attic gives you just enough clues to conclude that the bride is the guilty party, as we saw.  What's the Hat Box Ghost up to, anyway?  He'sshowing you what happened.  Got his noggin whacked off and hidden in a hatbox.  The murderer evidently got away with it, but now the victim's ghost has come back to reveal the awful truth to the world.  The crime is illustrated before your eyes and it is linked to the bride via the synchronized heartbeat.  Very efficient storytelling—this all takes about a second and a half.  These guys are GOOD. Note that the question of justice enters in here—you wonder who committed the crime—whereas when you see the knight in the graveyard, who is just as beheaded as the HBG is, you don't ask any such questions.  The perp is right there, after all, and neither of them care any more, and you don't even know which was in the right and which was in the wrong.  And you don't care either.  You regard the two beheading victims in completely different ways.  Creepy atmosphere + a hatbox in the attic = bingo,  you're in murder mystery land. Oh, all right, I hear those fingers drumming on the tabletop.  You've been good, so here.  Here's a few more Connie shots by Jeff Fillmore (aka ~Life by the Drop~ at flickr).  She's miserably hard to photograph, and I don't know how he does it, but IMO Mr. F. has got the best Connie shots on the Web.

From beginning to end, the attic scene has never been free of the grisly-hatbox symbol.  It is just as fundamental as the bride herself.  We noted how the two blast-up ghosts were skullish heads popping from hatboxes.  They were there from 1969 until 2006.  You can go back earlier.  Here again is a shot of the scale model, which we've seen before:

Let's pan to the right and see what got cropped out.  Well looky there.  I see two hatboxes, and one of them is suspiciously isolated.  You look inside, I just had dinner.

Next up, some Claude Coats concept art for the attic:

Well, I'm not so sure that it isn't an innocent hatbox in this case.  But this is an attic.  No doubt something horrid is hidden there.  Any guesses where the body is?  Possibly the trunk, but if you didn't think, "Maybe walled up in the brickwork of that chimney," you really need to read more books and see more movies.  See how it works?  They know that you just know these things. When they were kicking around ideas for a New Bride in the mid-2000's, there was a range of ideas put out there for consideration.  One widely-reproduced sketch that passes as "concept art for Constance" actually stayed very close to the then-current bride.  Still has the candle, still has the beating heart, still has the bouquet, and still has the blank white eyes.  Just a coked-up version of the "middle bride," really.

Oh, and if you come across a less-severely cropped version...well whaddya know:

Here's the Frank tableau in the finished make-over at Disneyland:

Nice.  And here's a piece of concept art for it.  (Nudge nudge:  lower left, atbox-hay on the oor-flay).

Just in case you think I'm imagining things, some concept art for Constance throws subtlety to the wind and takes us directly back to Hat Box Ghost territory.  Oh, and notice how close this Connie is to the finished character:

Ewww.  That'll put you off your Eggs Benedict.

Reportedly, there were plans to put a stack of five hatboxes across from Constance in the HBG's old spot, with the names of her five husbands on them.  Hatbox city.  One report even suggested that they would light up and glow from within.  That didn't happen, but they did put a hat-rack there, with hats on it matching Connie's hubbies in the portraits.  Heh heh.  When they put Constance into the WDW attic in 2007, they too got a hat-rack, but they also got the stack of hatboxes.  No name tags or lights though.

Wouldn't want to be in there on a warm day.  Notice the swords laying around.  You don't suppose that means anything, do you?

With the grisly-hatbox symbol, you've got CRIME looking for PUNISHMENT.  You've uncovered something deliberately hidden.  There's a murderer out there somewhere, a score to settle, a vengeance yet denied.  Question:  How has the attic bride always been different from most of the other ghosts you see?  Answer:  She's not happy.  No socializing for her.  Even Constance is only experiencing the lunatic glee of the criminally insane.  If you insist on calling it "happy," then it's kind of a Charles Manson happy, you know?  I wouldn't say she's happy.  She's not forgiven or forgiving, not within the embrace of any resolution.  But is justice being served?  Well, if she wasn't so utterly wacked-out, she'd realize that she's exposing herself and being exposed.  Hattie with his damning heart-beat box is gone, but now we've got five haunted wedding portraits with the husbands' heads disappearing.  Those portraits are five ghostly fingers from beyond the grave laying accusation.  And yet, those guys aren't happy either, and they don't even get the relief of being too crazy to care.  You don't see forgiveness, but you don't see just deserts either.  The ghostly revelations inspire no remorse in Connie, and she's suffering no reprisal.  Her madness has taken her to a place without punishment, but also without love.

This is a very sour note in the HM, and it may well be a thematic blunder.  The Connie addition is seriously flawed.  Unlike the knight and executioner, there has not been any post-mortem reconciliation in this case.  They're grim ghosts without the grinning part.  If there were a way to show the husbands yukking it up with Connie, all of them laughing at the silly fuss their earthly crime drama stirred up, then they'd be part of the Marc Davis all-is-now-well joke.  Or, alternately, if the hubbies were allowed to show some sense of satisfaction that at last the murderer has been caught out, putting their spirits to rest, avenging them, giving them something to grin about like the old Hat Box Ghost, then they would fit into the traditional role of the attic as the "justice must be satisfied" asterisk added to the otherwise merry universalism of the Haunted Mansion.  As things stand, the message of the attic is, "the Devil wins," however lightly and humorously expressed.  Yes, you will survive death and live forever; but no, there is no guarantee that you will find either justice or forgiveness on the other side.  That's a common enough stance in modern horror, of course, but it is utterly foreign to the Mansions.  Or it was, until May 2006.

Originally Posted: Wednesday, June 2, 2010 Original Link: [x]

[memorabilia14-blog]

"Goddess or woman capable of LOVING..."

Such a definition as Femininity has a different definition in our culture. Glossy magazines, films, television and radio give countless definitions of what makes a woman a woman. Why is it important to define the notion of femininity? In the first place, in order to understand our female essence and purpose. In modern culture femininity can be manifested Shopaholic, flirtation, wearing heels, nice makeup, the ability to cook and many other things. In order to understand the origins of femininity and find out its true nature, we need to understand what biblical femininity looks like. We see that the female essence is rooted in how God created woman on the biological composition and inner spirit. It does not depend on Hobbies, interests or personality. Therefore, a woman can love fishing, hunting and cars and to be as feminine as a woman who loves shopping, cooking and interior design. Elements of biblical femininity we see in such manifestations as the natural vulnerability, the ability to love, mercy, kindness, care and compassion. We see that our femininity is manifested when we are associated with the greatest number of people. To appear in communications to connect to the living - that is our true nature. That's why we love to talk for hours, to correspond, to talk about every situation and every feeling associated with this situation, and only then, we feel heard and understood. That's why, when a man interrupts us and says, "Let me tell you what to do" we get upset. Because we use it as an opportunity to connect with other people and to be closer to them. When a woman has a great spirit she is able to create an environment in her presence man feels "at home". In contrast, in the weakness and suffering we are capable of hurting even those we love. Woman by nature is a caregiver. This is manifested even in physical form. Because women have Breasts and uterus to feed and nurture the fetus. Itself female composition creates and nurtures life. It has become very fashionable to "educate femininity". I believe that this in itself is silly because femininity is given to every woman at birth. Therefore, a woman who is not married and has no children in form and in spirit as well as feminine woman who has 30 children. The third element of femininity is vulnerability. As women, we have an incredible ability to be soft, sensitive and vulnerable, combined with the emotional fortitude to overcome the attacks against the vulnerability that we inevitably face. And yet, we often zamurueva our hearts, because once our vulnerability was used against us. Women often close their hearts to prevent being damaged, the victims or the wounded. We block the pain. We can choose the defensive position, to close , to protect themselves and withdraw from people in General , to control the relationship, to manipulate, to play, to pretend and even suppress others. We think that if we appear tough and strong, we will not be able to hurt. And in fact, this means that we are so weak that you have to mask all of our feelings to avoid pain. Really feminine woman can feel and Express their feelings in a healthy relationship, and not hide behind a facade of strength and neprobivaemosti. The next element of femininity is the desire to be beautiful. For girls it is very important to be beautiful not only externally but also internally. The ability to make yourself beautiful gives a woman absolute joy. Hence, a huge craving for shopping, beauty salons, all kinds of anti-aging and aesthetic treatments, sporting events, etc. However, the internal qualities of a woman beyond her visual appeal. Not passing the beauty of women is rooted in calmness of spirit and tenderness. She can be strong-willed, brave, cheerful, purposeful, but at the same time quiet and gentle. Therefore, a true lady needs to work on inner qualities and use appearance as a tool to get men to stumble. After all, appearance is always a manifestation that happens to a woman inside. The last element of femininity is the ability to be responsive. This includes qualities such as the ability to be soft, gentle. A woman is able to be flexible, wise, kind, inspire others, give a wonderful mood, light and joy. Lady always remembers that its true strength lies in weakness, not in self-centered "strength." Femininity has a wide face and gives a good ground for strengthening of true masculinity. For women of the 21st century is quite difficult to find a strong role model of womanhood. The archetype of the woman - goddess, can serve you the strength and inspiration for their own achievements. I want to cite the example of some archetypes that can inspire you. Lady Di Princess Diana showed girls and women of the world, even the crown, can be worn noble. Not only that, she wore a crown, she used it to empower the rescue of distressed and sick people. Her life became a solid position of motherhood not only his own boys, but to the world. Many believe that they personally knew Lady Di and had experienced the death of Princess as a personal tragedy. The ability to Love from Lady Di: • In order to receive love you must give. Diana gave her love even those people whom she had never met. You can also get this love. • Be kind, sympathetic and help others. Find giving a part of yourself, and you open the door to true self-love. And whenever the pain of your past stop the action, refer to Princess Di for inspiration.

Audrey Hepburn Audrey gave the world the lessons of the power of the female spirit and boundless kindness. She was able to realize herself as an actress, wife, mother and goodwill Ambassador for UNICEF. She attended the most disadvantaged areas of Africa, South America, Turkey, and Vietnam. Hepburn donated to the charity's own funds and becoming an example of strength and determination to beat those in power, vaccines, drinking water, food, bricks for the construction of hospitals, orphanages and schools. Unusual for her education and knowledge of six languages helped Audrey to her task. It with equal ease and communicated with Ministers of state, and with sick children from the poorest black neighborhoods. Love lessons from Audrey Hepburn • In order to conquer the hearts of men know their individual characteristics and skillfully outplay them. Remember that stylish can be called only the woman who refuses to blindly imitate the existing traditions and finding his way. • Before you sacrifice your luck that put you talent and hard work, it is worth considering whether there is what that is. • A relationship built on deception will not last long. Dreams are fine, but in a relationship the most important thing to see a real man with all his advantages and disadvantages. • Happiness in your personal life possible at any age and in any difference in years, we just need to keep your heart open to love. • personal life should remain personal. Dedicating every detail of their relationship, you run the risk of making himself and partner topic of gossip and gossip.

Angelina Jolie Ambassador, actress, devoted mother, sex symbol, lawyer in the world. This woman is a living archetype of self-confidence. Lessons of Love from Angelina • When you feel intimidated and unsure of yourself, meditate, think positive. Remember that the resources of this world, trapped inside you. Oprah Winfrey Journalist, actress, producer and philanthropist. For me is a living example of determination, self-belief, perseverance and passion. Love from Oprah Winfrey She had heard many failures in television, movies and Newspapers. In fact, the failure only strengthened the spirit and made the woman even more. Now Oprah's possibilities seem LIMITLESS. Choose her as an archetype every time you say to yourself: "I can't, I'm not dachnica, I have nothing Positive thinking, vibrations, energy, meditation and spirituality helped through difficult times and brought her in happiness. When you're in doubt, and the subject no one to turn to for advice, set mileny contact with Oprah. This heart and kind guest will be able to find the words that inspire...

[pope-francis-quotes]

3rd April >> Pope Francis sent a message to OSCE human trafficking conference calling for an end to the 'worsening tragedy' of human trafficking

(Vatican Radio) Pope Francis' message to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE)’s “17th Alliance against Trafficking in Persons Conference,” taking place in Vienna. The message was read by Fr. Michael Czerny, SJ, Under-secretary of the Migrants and Refugees Section of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development. The Holy Father called the problem “a form of slavery, a crime against humanity, a grave violation of human rights, and an atrocious scourge” and said that in some instances, “evidence brings one to doubt the real commitment of some important players.” Please find below the full text of the message: 17th Alliance against Trafficking in Persons Conference “Trafficking in Children and the Best Interests of the Child” Vienna, 3 April 2017 CHILD TRAFFICKING: SOME URGENT CONCERNS Michael Czerny S.J. Under-Secretary of the Migrants and Refugees Section: Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development MESSAGE It is my honour to begin this keynote with a warm greeting from Pope Francis to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe and to everyone involved in this important Conference: For the Alliance Against Trafficking in Persons to gather for a 17th Conference in Vienna is a welcome sign of the OSCE’s determination to eradicate what must be among the most shameful dynamics to scar the face of modern humanity. Most believers of any faith and people of all persuasions are shocked, indeed scandalized, when they discover that trafficking occurs in every country and that it represents a most prosperous business on the planet. It is a form of slavery, a crime against humanity, a grave violation of human rights, an atrocious scourge, and it is all the more to be condemned when it takes place against children. Therefore I very much welcome your deliberations about “Trafficking in Children and the Best Interests of the Child”. Let us indeed do everything we can to raise public awareness and better coordinate governmental, legal, enforcement and social efforts to rescue millions of children, as well as adults. Just as urgently, let us do even more to prevent them from being trafficked and enslaved. I earnestly pray for the successful and fruitful work of the Conference, I invoke upon all the participants, organizers and staff the Blessing of the Almighty, which I also ask you to convey to all those who are engaged in helping the victims of human trafficking and ending this terrible crime in the OSCE countries. These words of Pope Francis are addressed to all people, believers or not, who hold human life precious and want everyone to flourish. Let me add my own gratitude for your welcome to this Conference and for giving the Holy See the opportunity to propose some fundamental terms of reference at the start of our two days of deliberations. INTRODUCTION The 17th Conference aims at enhancing the coherence and synergy of the responses to the challenges posed by child trafficking in the OSCE region, seeking solely the best interests of the child. When spelling out the mandate of the Section for Migrants and Refugees within the Holy See’s new Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, Pope Francis asked that special attention be paid to the victims of human trafficking and, among them, to children. Today’s complex migration scenario is sadly characterized by “[…] new forms of slavery imposed by criminal organizations, which buy and sell men, women and children.” Accordingly, Pope Francis dedicated his Message for the 2017 World Day of Migrants and Refugee to “Child Migrants, the Vulnerable and the Voiceless.” He felt “[…] compelled to draw attention to the reality of child migrants, especially the ones who are alone” because “[…] among migrants, children constitute the most vulnerable group.” In 2014, during his pilgrimage to the Holy Land on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the meeting between Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras in Jerusalem, Pope Francis expressed his burning concern for the situation of “great numbers of children [who] continue to live in inhuman situations, on the fringes of society, in the peripheries of great cities and in the countryside. All too many children continue to be exploited, maltreated, enslaved, prey to violence and illicit trafficking. Still too many children live in exile, as refugees, at times lost at sea, particularly in the waters of the Mediterranean. Today, in acknowledging this, we feel shame before God.” This powerful appeal joins those addressed by previous Popes to intergovernmental and international organizations, to civil society, to citizens everywhere. But the tragedy of trafficking persists and is indeed worsening. We can only conclude, sadly and indeed penitently, that all such efforts have so far proven insufficient. In some situations, evidence brings one to doubt the real commitment of some important players. This moved Pope Benedict XVI in 2010 to affirm: “While the Convention on the Rights of the Child clearly states that the best interests of the minor shall always be safeguarded (cf. Art. 3, 1), […] unfortunately this does not always happen in practice. Although there is increasing public awareness of the need for immediate and incisive action to protect minors, nevertheless, many are left to themselves and, in various ways, face the risk of exploitation.” METHOD Our 17th Conference intends to foster the well-known approach of the three pillars or P’s: to prevent, to protect and to prosecute. To these dimensions of effective action against trafficking, we add to partner. Let us apply these four perspectives in order to see and understand the phenomenon of child trafficking and to judge the immediate and wider causes, in order to undertake action against this continuing scourge. 1. PREVENTION In 2015, Pope Francis stated that modern slavery is “[…] rooted in a notion of the human person, which allows him or her to be treated as an object. Whenever sin corrupts the human heart and distances us from our Creator and our neighbours, the latter are no longer regarded as beings of equal dignity, as brothers or sisters sharing a common humanity, but rather as objects.” Our first step, therefore, must be a cultural transformation that restores the human person to the centre. “Benedict XVI reminded us that precisely because it is human, all human activity, including economic activity, must be ethically structured and governed (cf. Encyclical Letter Caritas in Veritate, n. 36). We must return to the centrality of the human being, to a more ethical vision of activities and of human relationships without the fear of losing something.” Where human beings are objectified, children can be trafficked according to a perverse market logic of supply and demand. From the “supply” side, in communities of origin, several factors increase the vulnerability of the child victims, namely endemic poverty, inadequate child protection, ignorance and cultural constraints. It should be acknowledged that very little has been done to address the “why” of many young people being tricked or sold into trafficking and slavery. From the “demand” side, in the communities of destination of this tragic trade, one cannot but note the evident paradox between the unanimous and absolute condemnation of child trafficking on the one side and, on the other, the increasing demand for children to be enslaved, exploited and abused. This is possibly the nastiest illustration of how modern capitalism at its amoral extremes is able to commoditize absolutely everything, even young lives. In his 2017 Message, Pope Francis strongly underlines these observations: “[T]he most powerful force driving the exploitation and abuse of children is demand. If more rigorous and effective action is not taken against those who profit from such abuse, we will not be able to stop the multiple forms of slavery where children are the victims” Demand and supply, in turn, are deeply rooted in the three great issues of conflicts and wars, economic privation and natural disasters, or what the victims experience as extreme poverty, underdevelopment, exclusion, unemployment and lack of access to education. OSCE, with its 57 well-developed member States, surely has a unique opportunity to address these root causes of human trafficking. Our response, therefore, should not be “We cannot” nor “We don’t want to”. 2. PROTECTION The second pillar is “protect”. It is increasingly difficult nowadays to protect children from well-organized and unscrupulous criminal networks. Situations of great vulnerability have multiplied dramatically in recent years, partly as a result of forced massive displacement that have affected some regions of the world. In 2007, referring to unaccompanied children, in 2007 Pope Benedict XVI pointed out that “[…] these boys and girls often end up on the street abandoned to themselves and prey to unscrupulous exploiters who often transform them into the object of physical, moral and sexual violence.” In 2016 Pope Francis added that “[…] the dividing line between migration and trafficking can at times be very subtle.” There are many remarkable initiatives, undertaken both by States and by civil society organizations, to ensure better protection of child victims of trafficking. In line with the title of this conference, let me emphasize the ultimate objective: the best interests of the child, in which the family dimension occupies a place of greatest importance. Protection of children requires the protection of families; therefore, policies and programs must provide families with the essential tools to protect and nurture their children in situations of vulnerability. Among these essentials – all well within reach of OSCE member-states – are decent housing, healthcare, the opportunity to work, education … In this regard, an appropriate international legal framework has been established by the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography. 3. PROSECUTION As for “prosecution”, the complexity of the global human trafficking scenario makes prosecuting traffickers very difficult. The nefarious action of international criminal organizations, motivated by the lure of lavish profits, begins through underhanded trickery and kidnappings in the victims’ home communities,. The action then continues in the countries of transit and countries of destination, thanks to corruption that ensures invisibility and impunity for traffickers. This is so serious that Pope Francis has stated: “[S]ince it is not possible to commit so complex a crime as human trafficking without the complicity, by action or omission, of States, it is evident that, when efforts to prevent and combat this phenomenon are insufficient, we are again facing a crime against humanity. Moreover, should it happen that someone who is appointed to protect people and guarantee their freedom, instead becomes an accomplice of those who trade in human beings, then, in such cases, the States are responsible before their citizens and before the International Community.” While acknowledging the efforts of some countries to punish those responsible for such crimes, we must sadly note that there are still too few cases where “consumers” have ended up in prison. While perhaps not the masterminds, they are definitely the real authors responsible for such heinous crimes. 4. PARTNERSHIP The establishment of effective networks to prevent the trade, protect victims and prosecute traffickers is a real key to success, as Pope Francis stated in 2016: “It is important that ever more effective and incisive cooperation be implemented, based not only on the exchange of information, but also on the reinforcement of networks capable of assuring timely and specific intervention; and this, without underestimating the strength that ecclesial communities reveal especially when they are united in prayer and fraternal communion.” Here the Holy Father is pointing towards “partnership” as an important addition to the conventional 3 P’s of prevention, protection, prosecution. This suggestion has arisen from experience in the field. The formation of partnerships to fight trafficking must be based on recognition of the contribution that each partner can offer according to its abilities and skills, coupled with deep respect for the principle of subsidiarity. Let us not forget that different partners have distinct attributes. Many victims turn to civil and religious organizations because they have learned to mistrust public institutions or are afraid of being punished (retribution). That is why it is important that the institutions collaborate regularly with such organizations in the formulation and implementation of effective programs and the provision of the necessary tools. Encounter, networking, social media and spirituality are among the useful means exercising partnership. CONCLUSION At Bethlehem, Pope Francis expressed this vision: “Today too, children are a sign. They are a sign of hope, a sign of life, but also a ‘diagnostic’ sign, a marker indicating the health of families, society and the entire world. Wherever children are accepted, loved, cared for and protected, the family is healthy, society is more healthy and the world is more human.” Let this be our firm purpose during this 17th Conference and in the courageous actions to which it subsequently leads. Thank you.

[stewartry]

Persuasion - Jane Austen

I say this a lot, but it's been a very long time since I read Persuasion. I know the movie (Ciaran Hinds and Amanda Root, for me the only one worth watching) very very well, and it was a pure joy to be reminded of how utterly and beautifully faithful it is to the book, and another joy to be reminded of all of the elements that did not make it into the film. Karen Savage's reading was lovely and just enhanced my enjoyment of the story.

I wonder if the book's title came from the prevalence of the word throughout the text, or if Miss Austen went back and threaded different forms of "persuade" into it afterward. (Wikipedia's messy article on the book (really, if someone's read Austen I would have thought that meant they could use proper English) indicates that the book was untitled at Jane Austen's death and that her brother named it – therefore, I guess, the former.) It's a pernicious little word, and quiet in its poison. Nineteen-year-old Anne was not bullied into giving Frederick up, nor ordered to do so, nor forced – nothing so loud and against her will. No, it's worse: she was persuaded. Lady Russell poured poison into her ear and sweetly nudged and subtly herded and full only of concern for Anne and only in her best interests steered her away from him until Anne bent to her will, became convinced that such a marriage would be bad not only for her and her family but also for him, and she turned him away. I don't doubt but that was quite a bit less quiet.

I like Anne, a great deal. She was, I think, not so much weak as pliant and obliging when she was young; she retains some of that pliability, but the pain she has lived with for eight years has woken her up and steeled her spine. She is willing and content to do for others, even those who are tiresome or who require rather than request, but she has a mind of her own, and it's a good one.

I don't know if I would love Wentworth without Ciaran Hinds's interference; I would like him, at least, and sympathize with him; I don't think it would be a Boromir-saved-by-Sean-Bean situation. He sounds like he was a bit free-wheeling when he was younger and courting Anne – he made a good deal of money and spent it, though Miss Austen declines to say on what. He does not seem to be a gambler of any sort; my semi-informed guess would be that he spent it on things he liked and on his sister and brother and friends.

I despise Lady Russell. I said so on a Goodreads Austen group, and was (genteelly, as befits an Austen group) jumped on for it and in all ways declared to be in the wrong. ("She stops the marriage with Wentworth because she cares so much for Anne and wants to protect her. Wentworth is penniless, was about to go to war and could have died.") I backed off, thinking my opinion must be faulty because it was based mainly on the film and not the book; the movie, I thought, must have slanted the character to encourage my dislike.

But it didn't. Listening to the book, I was a little surprised – and a little gratified – to find that while Lady Russell has to her credit a genuine affection and care for Anne, she is every bit as ludicrously snobbish and closed-minded as I thought – as much so, in fact, as Sir Walter himself. She. Ruined. Anne's. Life. Eight years of it, at least, and her interference was only remedied by chance. Also: Frederick's life, ruined. For eight years, both of them existed in some degree of misery because of Lady Russell. She took their love lightly, counted it as far less important than Anne's countenance and position, and never took into consideration the fact that in her concern for Anne's future security she was thoroughly sabotaging Anne's present and future happiness.

Was Lady Russell well-meaning? Of course. I never questioned that she honestly loved Anne. Was Lady Russell wrong? In theory, no. In practice, very much so. And in the end, criminally. The article I link there talks about how Lady R was trying to save Anne from making the same mistake as her mother – but she did not, apparently, trouble herself to determine that Frederick was very different from Sir Walter Elliot, nor that feeling ran deep on both sides. Anne might have had eight years of worrying over Frederick being injured or killed in the wars, but in the end …

Was Anne at fault as well? Of course. But she was nineteen years old. And it wasn’t a 19 comparable in any way to 19 years old today; it was a sheltered 19 used to being guided by her guardians, unused to having her voice heard or heeded. She relied on Lady Russell as she would have her own mother. And Lady Russell was dead set against Wentworth.

Put it this way: if she had continued to allow herself to be guided – to be persuaded – by Lady Russell at the age of 27 there's a damn good possibility she would have shortly found herself married to Mr. Elliot; that good lady despised him as much as Sir Walter in the beginning, and swung entirely over to his side with surprising quickness. Despite what she knew of his past, she saw an agreeable face and manners and an evidently decent fortune and set her persuasiveness to the end of pushing Anne toward him as she had pushed her away from Wentworth. If Wentworth had been married; if he had indicated he couldn't stand the sight of Anne; if Anne had fallen out of love with him; if she had not at that moment had Wentworth filling her eyes and heart Anne might have been once more persuaded. And that would have turned the story into a tragedy.

Another part of that discussion on Goodreads that completely shocked me was about how Wentworth victimized Anne – "8 years after what happened between them, Wentworth did not forget, he came back to avenge for his broken heart; 8 years is more than enough to forget and forgive! Wentworth was decided to hurt Anne. He was indulged with the Miss Musgroves though he had no intentions of going beyond flirtations. He did it to rub it in Anne's face" …

I didn't fight it then and there; I did protest, and happily was backed up by someone else; but, again, I didn't go into detail because I wasn't entirely sure of my ground, and my partisanship for Frederick Wentworth is obviously influenced by my infatuation with Ciaran Hinds in the role. Who knew but that the movie whitewashed Frederick a bit and slandered Lady R? Well. It didn't. Wentworth re-emerged into Anne's life because he had little choice in the matter. He could have shirked it, told his sister that he had to be elsewhere – but he's not that kind of man, and besides which they were renting the Elliots' house for an extended period. He had to know he wasn't going to be able to avoid the Elliots for the whole time, and – in keeping with his character indicated by his naval actions and advancement – he did not try to avoid it, letting very little time pass before he entered the fray and went to visit his sister. Was he rather cutting with her? Sure. It would take a saint to refrain completely from at least a few cutting remarks. She broke his heart eight years ago and he has not found anyone else in the intervening time to mend it. He genuinely loved her: "I have loved none but you. Unjust I may have been, weak and resentful I have been, but never inconstant." "Weak and resentful" – he admits it, he was unforgiving when they first met, and he has regretted it. But eight years is hardly "more than enough to forget and forgive" – anyone writing that has never had deep feelings for someone. She wronged him in such a way as to wreck both their lives. Eight years is nothing at all with that kind of pain.

"…He had no intentions of going beyond flirtations". Nonsense. He had built himself a successful career, and now in this time of peace all he hears is "you'll be finding yourself a wife soon, of course!" He had been severely hurt by Anne, and my guess would be that he had no intention of even thinking about considering the least notion of courting her, ever again. She was never demonstrative, and was still working her way through her own feelings, so she could not and would not and did not offer him any sort of encouragement. And there at the Musgroves' and most certainly in Lyme, with two pretty girls flinging themselves at him (literally, in the case of Louisa) and Anne very much not flinging herself at him, how could he not entertain the idea that one of these girls was a possibility? He was expected to settle down; he had a desire to settle down. He was … persuaded … that he ought to choose a wife and, since he could not apparently have the love of his life it might as well be the bright and vivacious Louisa, not least because everyone around him (including Louisa) took it as read. Then silly Louisa fell, and he saw how Anne reacted in the crisis – both the immediate emergency and in the trying days after – and gauged her reactions to him, and doesn't seem to have given Louisa, much less her sister, another thought. I believe he gave some serious thought to the Musgrove sisters – which is my belief if for no other reason than that it would be a rather repulsive man who would toy with two young girls just to get back at an old flame, and Anne would not continue to love an ugly-spirited man.<br /><br />What, I wonder, would have happened if Frederick Wentworth had returned to Anne's life under different circumstances? As a lowly lieutenant or commander, not having caught the luck and bounties that Captain Wentworth could rejoice in? Would Anne have been strong enough to see that he still loved her, and to accept a renewal of his courtship?

In the end, Lady Russell does redeem herself. She is forced to face the fact that she was wrong – about Wentworth, about Elliot, about Anne.

The only one among them whose opposition of feeling could excite any serious anxiety was Lady Russell. Anne knew that Lady Russell must be suffering some pain in understanding and relinquishing Mr. Elliot, and be making some struggles to become truly acquainted with, and do justice to Captain Wentworth. This, however, was what Lady Russell had now to do. She must learn to feel that she had been mistaken with regard to both; that she had been unfairly influenced by appearances in each; that because Captain Wentworth's manners had not suited her own ideas, she had been too quick in suspecting them to indicate a character of dangerous impetuosity; and that because Mr. Elliot's manners had precisely pleased her in their propriety and correctness, their general politeness and suavity, she had been too quick in receiving them as the certain result of the most correct opinions and well-regulated mind. There was nothing less for Lady Russell to do, than to admit that she had been pretty completely wrong, and to take up a new set of opinions and of hopes.

One note I can't resist making in counterpoint to the article in defense of Lady Russell:

When Lady Russell objects to Frederick’s having “no connexions to secure even his farther rise in” the navy, we should not interpret this as an example of her “value for rank and consequence” (11). (It is interesting to speculate that Frederick must have never mentioned to anyone other than Anne during his initial visit to Somersetshire that he had a naval “connexion” in his sister, the wife of Admiral Croft. Mrs. Croft says in 1814 that she has been married for fifteen years and thus would have been married to the admiral for seven years by 1806.)

He wasn't necessarily an admiral as yet in 1806.

If for no other reason, Persuasion is one of my favorite books because it contains one of my favorite passages, one of my favorite letters, fictional or non.  

Frederick: I can listen no longer in silence. I must speak to you by such means as are within my reach. You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own than when you almost broke it, eight years and a half ago. Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you. Unjust I may have been, weak and resentful I have been, but never inconstant. You alone have brought me to Bath. For you alone, I think and plan. Have you not seen this? Can you fail to have understood my wishes? I had not waited even these ten days, could I have read your feelings, as I think you must have penetrated mine. I can hardly write. I am every instant hearing something which overpowers me. You sink your voice, but I can distinguish the tones of that voice when they would be lost on others. Too good, too excellent creature! You do us justice, indeed. You do believe that there is true attachment and constancy among men. Believe it to be most fervent, most undeviating, in F. W. I must go, uncertain of my fate; but I shall return hither, or follow your party, as soon as possible. A word, a look, will be enough to decide whether I enter your father's house this evening or never.

Such a letter was not to be soon recovered from.

I imagine not.

~View all my reviews~

[laureneruimy]

roots

The starting point of this project is the idea from chapter 2 unit 1 that time isn’t linear and History (as in a specific point in time) repeats itself. From this, I studied (from some of my french classes) the moral of apologs and the fact that nowadays it’s still relevant, for example Le Pouvoir des Fables by Jean De La Fontaine can be applied to the overmediatisation of the american presidential elections, or the quick news format (to avoid boring people).

But the fact that something is always relevant can’t be proven from a text this recent so I decided to study older apologs.

In Le Pouvoir des Fables, La Fontaine refers to another fable by Aesop, which is from Antic Greece. Myths and Apologs having the same principle, I decided to work on how their moral is still relevant in the XXIe century. After comparing and associated different myths from different sources (Bible, Edda, Ancient Greece…) to recent events, I connected the two eras. But it was obvious that this area was way too wide to study. After centering my research on greek mythology, I had to keep in mind the adaptation from greek to latin (from zeus to jupiter and from the Iliad to the Metamorphosis) and then, the notion of translation/adaptation rose.

The choice of the myth of Cassandra was made from the comparing phase. At this point, I compared it to articles on global warming, how scientists were warning political leaders about this main issue and how they’ve been ignored for more than a decade with arguments like « it’s still snowing it’s not getting warmer !! ».

While studying the myth, the issue of translation and adaptation arose again. Cassandra first appear in the Iliad. Like every greek myth, it is an orally told story (a poem) and it was written down by Homer in two volumes : the Iliad and the Odyssey. There is a first level of adaptation and translation, from orally told to written down. What is interesting to note at this point is : Who is Homer ? Or, what is Homer ? Homer isn’t one author, we found out recently that it was a pen name for more than one person which implies that the original style was quite different but with the multiple translations and adaptations, the style has been unified as if written by one person.

The Iliad being known worlwide since the Ve BC, I had to recenter my research around one specifid language or country. Being french and having studied the Iliad in my main language, I chose to study the Iliad and its french translations and adaptations. But because Cassandra is an Iliad character, I also had to  look into visual representations from ancient Greece to nowadays.

It is interesting to note that the first representation of Cassandra, from 520-510 BC represents her as a warrior, while there is a switch AC where she is only represented in the scene where she is raped after the loss of Troy ; which rise the notion of feminism in the myth of Cassandra.

While the content of the poem don’t change, the translators took liberty in the style, changing sentences or words creating new versions every time where the focus change depending on the century’s sensibility.

Since I focused on France, and, struggled to find a time where women were seen more as warrior than victims (example of Joan of Arc that was burned at the stake and considered crazy), I looked into written pieces that could fit a wide range of female characters.

I could talk about Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Laclos (1782), the two opposing characters being women one manipulative and one too naive. It is also interesting to note the audience’s reaction that pushed Laclos to add a preface specifying that this book exist only to « warn » young ladies of villains, to protect them, which is interesting because nowadays the main character seems to be the « villain » and how, despite being a woman, she succeed in her schemes and got punished for it (the end does seems to me like it was taken from greek tragedies).

But we can also talk about Emile Zola and his serie Les Rougons-Macquarts, where Zola presents an interesting range of female characters from the lowest classes to the highest ones under the Second Empire. In literature, Naturalism pretends having the « truest » approach to characters. Zola writes down characters and try not to interfers with their lives and not to put them under his judgment. Which is really interesting for characters like Nana (1880).

Nana is the daughter of Gervaise Macquart and Coupeau, we can catch glimpses of her childhood in L’Assommoir, since then we can see that she isn’t the typical female character. She is harsh, she isn’t modest and she doesn’t bother with conventions, but the author still don’t use badly connoted adjectives to talk about her and dedicate an entire book to her life where we learn she grew up playing Venus in a theater production while she can’t sing or act, but her body is enough for her to get the role. She is also a prostitute, and, live in a rich appartement that one of her lover gave her. She knows that everything she owns is due to her looks and she takes advantage of it in the same way that the main antagonist/protagonist in Les Liaisons Dangereuses do.

While Zola don’t write this book « to warn young ladies » and never offered any judgment of Nana, the book ends badly for the character even if we can’t call it Deus Ex Machina like for Les Liaisons Dangereuses because of the fact that every book of Les Rougon-Macquart ends up dramatically for the characters for very believable reasons (opposing to Les Liaisons Dangereuses that seemed more far-fetched), for example Gervaise from L’Assommoir becomes homeless after Coupeau die in the Asylum and die of hunger in the streets. Nana dies of STD at twenty one during the fall of the Second Empire.

At the same time, these heroines aren’t the only representation of female characters. If I had the hypothesis that myths morales were still relevant at the beginning of the project, it can take other forms, other adaptations/translations.

For example, archetypes.

The word archetype, "original pattern from which copies are made", first entered into English usage in the 1540s and derives from the Latin noun archetypum, latinisation of the Greek noun ἀρχέτυπον (archetupon), whose adjective form is ἀρχέτυπος (archetupos), which means "first-molded", which is a compound of ἀρχή archē, "beginning, origin", and τύπος tupos, which can mean, amongst other things, "pattern," "model," or "type."

Archetypes were first used by Plato in Theory of Ideas, but then, Jung used this concept to frame his practice in 1919, his definition goes from « original pattern from which copies are made » to innate, universal prototypes for ideas and may be used to interpret observations. A group of memories and interpretations associated with an archetype is a complex, like the Cassandra Complex.

Still taking Cassandra as a case of study, the Cassandra archetype or Cassandra complex changed drastically three times but is still based on the mythological character (like most archetype; Hera for example is the original Hero archetype). I looked for informations on the Cassandra complex and its different versions.

In 1963, psychologist Melanie Klein provided an interpretation of Cassandra as representing the human moral conscience whose main task is to issue warnings. Cassandra as moral conscience, «predicts ill to come and warns that punishment will follow and grief arise.» Cassandra’s need to point out moral infringements and subsequent social consequences is driven by what Klein calls «the destructive influences of the cruel super-ego,» which is represented in the Greek myth by the god Apollo, Cassandra’s overlord and persecutor. Klein’s use of the metaphor centers on the moral nature of certain predictions, which tends to evoke in others « a refusal to believe what at the same time they know to be true, and expresses the universal tendency toward denial, [with] denial being a potent defense against persecutory anxiety and guilt. »

This version is close to the mythological character. Cassandra is telling the truth, but because of Apollo she isn’t listened by her audience.

In a 1988 study, Jungian analyst Laurie Layton Schapira, explored what she called the «Cassandra Complex» in the lives of two of her analysands. Based on clinical experience, she delineates three factors which constitute the Cassandra complex: • dysfunctional relationships with the «Apollo archetype», • emotional or physical suffering, including hysteria (conversion disorder) or «women’s problems», • being disbelieved when attempting to relate the facticity of these experiences to others.

Layton Schapira views the Cassandra complex as resulting from a dysfunctional relationship with what she calls the «Apollo archetype», an archetype which refers to any individual’s or culture’s pattern that is dedicated to, yet bound by, order, reason, intellect, truth and clarity that disavows itself of anything occult or irrational.[...] She further states that a «Cassandra woman» is very prone to hysteria because she «feels attacked not only from the outside world but also from within, especially from the body in the form of somatic, often gynaecological, complaints.» Addressing the metaphorical application of the Greek Cassandra myth, Layton Schapira states that: What the Cassandra woman sees is something dark and painful that may not be apparent on the surface of things or that objective facts do not corroborate. She may envision a negative or unexpected outcome; or something which would be difficult to deal with; or a truth which others, especially authority figures, would not accept. In her frightened, ego-less state, the Cassandra woman may blurt out what she sees, perhaps with the unconscious hope that others might be able to make some sense of it. But to them her words sound meaningless, disconnected and blown out of all proportion.

In this definition, the Cassandra archetype can only be a woman, she is opposed to the Apollo archetype again but is seen more negatively, the illogical hysteric part of the duo. I can’t help to find this definition mysogynistic.

In 1989, Jean Shinoda Bolen, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the University of California, published an essay on the god Apollo in which she detailed a psychological profile of the ‘Cassandra woman’ whom she suggested referred to someone suffering — as happened in the mythological relationship between Cassandra and Apollo — a dysfunctional relationship with an “Apollo man”. Bolen added that the Cassandra woman may exhibit “hysterical” overtones, and may be disbelieved when attempting to share what she knows. According to Bolen, the archetypes of Cassandra and Apollo are not gender-specific. [...] «As an archetype, Apollo personifies the aspect of the personality that wants clear definitions, is drawn to master a skill, values order and harmony, and prefers to look at the surface rather than at what underlies appearances. The Apollo archetype favors thinking over feeling, distance over closeness, objective assessment over subjective intuition.» Of what she describes as the negative Apollonic influence, Dr. Bolen writes: Individuals who resemble Apollo have difficulties that are related to emotional distance, such as communication problems, and the inability to be intimate... Rapport with another person is hard for the Apollo man. He prefers to access (or judge) the situation or the person from a distance, not knowing that he must «get close up» – be vulnerable and empathic – in order to truly know someone else.... But if the woman wants a deeper, more personal relationship, then there are difficulties... she may become increasingly irrational or hysterical. Bolen suggests that a Cassandra woman (or man) may become increasingly hysterical and irrational when in a dysfunctional relationship with a negative Apollo, and may experience others’ disbelief when describing her experiences.

While in the first definition, the Cassandra character could exist by itself, the other two implies it is a role that exist in a relationship. Here too, the definition seems quite negative for the Cassandra person.

NB. From these definitions, it seems that only women write about the Cassandra archetype.

While reading these definitions, I thought they were straying too far away from the myth and the representation of Cassandra, but also, they were becoming more and more specific. We go from « internal conflict » that can qualify a huge range of situations to « specific relationship between these two exact types of persons and a specific and unique way their relationship have to go » ; which goes against what Jung states in the first part of Man and His Symbols (1964)

« My views about the 'archaic remnants', which I call 'archetypes' or 'primordial images,' have been constantly criticized by people who lack a sufficient knowledge of the psychology of dreams and of mythology. The term 'archetype' is often misunderstood as meaning certain definite mythological images or motifs, but these are nothing more than conscious representations. Such variable representations cannot be inherited. The archetype is a tendency to form such representations of a motif—representations that can vary a great deal in detail without losing their basic pattern. »

What can also be taken out of this is that these definitions allow interpretations and deformations, it takes us back to Plato’s definition of « a modele from which copies are made ».

[rhetoricandlogic]

NIGERIANS IN SPACE BY DEJI BRYCE OLUKOTUN

reviewed by AISHWARYA SUBRAMANIAN

“Yeah, but what does that snowglobe mean?”

Deji Bryce Olukotun’s Nigerians in Space begins in 1990s America, where Wale Olufunmi, a lunar geologist, is attempting to steal a sample of moon rock from the NASA laboratory where he works. The sample is insurance, proof of his commitment to “brain gain” (the return of Nigerian academics to their home country as a corrective to the intellectual exodus to the West colloquially termed “brain drain,” about which so many countries worried during those years), and to a Nigerian space programme organised by the politician Nurudeen Bello to achieve it. Wale steals the rock—a contingency sample collected during the first moon landing, scientifically worthless but symbolically valuable—and smuggles it out of the country in the base of a snow globe. His plans rapidly fall apart, however, and Bello is mysteriously uncontactable. He finds himself stuck in limbo with his family, neither able to return to his American job, nor to enter Nigeria without a visa, witness to a murder, and in danger of arrest.

The bulk of the novel’s action takes place twenty years later. Wale, with his now-grown son Dayo, has settled in South Africa, where he runs a bamboo business out of his home, gives tours at the Royal Observatory, and has developed an obsession with finding Bello. Dayo has taken his father’s snow globe as the inspiration for a lamp which recreates natural moonlight. The two men’s lives intersect at various points with those of Thursday, a hapless abalone poacher of Malaysian descent, and Melissa, later Melle, a Zimbabwean girl with an unusual form of vitiligo that makes her skin glow with moonlight. Melle’s father is another of Bello’s victims and it is through her attempts to find out what has happened to him that we learn that most of those associated with the Brain Gain project have mysteriously died.

If all of this makes Nigerians in Space sound more like a thriller, all secret societies and high body counts, than a work of SF, that is probably accurate. None of its Nigerian characters gets to go into space. Within this sprawling, international, pan-African plot, few of them seem even to make it to Nigeria. And yet.

In September of last year, India (and if this feels like a bit of a geographical detour, such a thing is entirely in keeping with the events of this book) successfully sent a probe into orbit around Mars. The New York Times responded with a cartoon of a skinny man in a dhoti and turban, leading a cow, knocking on the door of a building marked “Elite Space Club,” with large, tuxedoed men seated inside. The paper later apologised for the offense caused, and offered a more flattering interpretation of this cartoon, but even here the humour was supposed to come from the incongruity of it all—the notion that a nation that could be represented by underfed farmers might have any place in what had been “the domain of rich, Western countries.”[1]

It’s an incongruity of which Nigerians in Space is well aware. The title is deliberately ludicrous (that “ . . . in SPAAAACE!” is what does it), and this is the book’s big challenge to the reader. What is being raised here, in the title as well as the text itself, is the whole question of who gets to imagine space, who gets to imagine themselves in space. In reality Nigeria does have a space programme, and has done for some years now (as do Egypt, Tunisia, and South Africa, among others). Olukotun, who is Nigerian-American, has claimed that one reason he did not know this when he started writing the book was that “it seemed too ridiculous to even be worth researching—I had made the idea up!”[2]

In late 2014 Africa2Moon, a crowdfunding campaign, was set up to facilitate the first phase of a pan-African mission to the moon. The campaign faced some criticism online over whether this should be a priority at all—surely there were other, more immediately useful things that such money could be spent on. But, in addition to the practical uses of a space programme that might be trotted out to counter this argument, explained the project manager, Jonathan Weltman, the moon had tremendous symbolic value. “You can walk outside and there it is [. . .] Kids across Africa can pull out a telescope and see it.”[3]

Wale also has to justify his interest in space travel in general, even to his wife. “It’s not the moon that’s important: it’s what that trip to the moon will produce. We’ll have communications satellites, improved crop yields, accurate population censuses. Nigeria doesn’t need weapons. We need innovation.” But it is the moon that is important (you can walk outside and there it is)—and it’s no accident that Dayo’s invention later in the book is tied more closely to the idea of the moon in its abstract form than to the space programme that, in the world of the book, seems not to have happened after all. This sense of the moon as a concretised symbol for a larger ideal (or several ideals) is one that recurs throughout Nigerians in Space. In Wale’s first conversations with Bello, the possibility of a Nigerian mission to the moon is presented as a form of reverse colonisation—both a satisfying response to the historical fact of colonialism and a kind of perpetuation of it.

“He said [the moon rock] didn’t belong to America but all humanity. He said we would return it to the moon when we landed our first mission as a symbol of ‘the colonized returning the cultural patrimony of all mankind.’ He wants us to plant a Nigerian flag.”

Science and symbol, science and story. In an episode later in the book, Dayo reports yet another failure to sell his lamps. “What story do you tell them about the lamp?” asks Wale:

Dayo went through his routine, trying to emphasize the technical parts. He used the words “luminosity” and “umbra” and “aqueous medium” with what he hoped was familiarity.

Wale then shows his son a part of the observatory where he works as a tour guide—a manhole once partly filled with mercury, used as a mirror to observe the sky.

“Can you imagine looking into a pool of mercury? Gauging the stars in a pool of quicksilver like an alchemist? It would be like floating in space [. . .] This is a popular part of my full-moon tour. It has nothing to do with selenometry anymore. No practical value. But this is where I get my repeat customers [. . .] You’ve got to come up with a story. Put some tension in it.”

You’ve got to come up with a story, and Nigerians in Space contains several. There’s the thriller plot, the SF plot. There’s a novel of exile and loss set in a fundamentally diasporic world (“No one knows what happened and I can’t go to Nigeria anymore . . . Because I’m a refugee”). There’s also an entire reading of the novel, one that appeals to me very much, which ignores all else and focuses on Wale’s personal relationship with the moon; his movement from scientist to priest (though even at the beginning of the book he “couldn’t defile a piece of the moon”). Wale becomes the moon’s chief storyteller, simultaneously narrating humankind’s historical relationship with it and inviting tourists to “look into the telescope and see your future.” If you (the reader) could fish around in the thick soup of meanings Wale ascribes to the moon and pick one, could make the moon a single, stable symbol to build on, perhaps the whole thing would begin to make sense.

Because the moon is what ties together the various strands of Nigerians in Space, Thursday’s abalone and Dayo’s lamp both feed off it, in different ways—as does the luminescence in Melissa’s skin. But is it the physical moon or the symbolic? What is the quality that the abalone (surely among the most SFnal of earthly creatures) recognise in Dayo’s lamps? Are we to read the “purity” of the light from the lamps as scientific innovation or as being somehow connected to the moon rock, on whose hiding place their design is based? Is Melle’s condition a biological one? Science or symbol: it’s partly in these questions that the novel’s claims to being science fictional, rather than science fiction-adjacent or even fantastic, rest. Unusual skin conditions and superior forms of solar energy may be less spectacular than the space travel promised by the title, but they deserve some attention.

In a different (and far more trite) book this constant referral back to the moon could work as a sort of levelling force—characters of Malaysian and Nigerian and Zimbabwean descent living in South Africa and France, and America, all seeing the same moon. Late in the novel, in what would in other circumstances be a climactic scene, Dayo’s lamps are strung up in the streets and they work, and the soft light from the lamps briefly erases all difference. But it’s not allowed to be a triumphant moment.

You’ve got to come up with a story, and Nigerians in Space, frustratingly, won’t let you. There’s no neat tying up of ends here. The mystery is unsolved, the thriller plot peters out. There’s so much meaning here and stories are, after all, only stories. If the novel does have a climactic scene it’s a confrontation between two of its protagonists, fittingly in the observatory, that ends in tragedy and leaves both with all their questions left unanswered. It’s a powerful scene, and a moving one, and it tells us nothing.

And of all the stories the book doesn’t tell, perhaps the most important is the one in which Nigerians go into space. In an article in Slate the author speaks about travelling to Nigeria and meeting a scientist at the National Space Research and Development Agency, whose real endeavours and successes are so easily erased by this book’s narrative of failure. “I had also learned the perverse burden of responsibility placed on an author who writes speculative fiction,” says Olukotun, but also: “Would you have read that story?”[2] I return to that title, and the story it tells about science and science fiction and who they’re for and whose triumphant journeys into the cosmos our collective imaginations allow. How much easier to imagine Nigerians on earth.

Endnotes

Source: "India Mars Mission: New York Times Apologises for Cartoon", BBC News, 6 October 2014 (accessed 12 October 2015). [return]

Source: "Meeting My Protagonist" by Deji Bryce Olukotun, Slate, September 2014 (accessed 12 October 2015). [return]

Source: "Africans Urged to Back Continent's First Moon Mission", The Guardian, 5 January 2015 (accessed 12 October 2015). [return]

[onemoarthing]

The Imperative for Interested Art

As part of a final paper for a class on cultural production research, I have been reading a lot of essays about the perceived crisis in criticism at the beginning of the 21st Century. These essays generally take two different positions. The first argues that criticism is in crisis because general consumers of media no longer rely on critics to inform their purchasing decisions. This argument seemed reasonable when people were rejecting print reviews and going to see large mid-aught Hollywood blockbusters, regardless of quality. However, I think it has more to do with the medium - print media - than the content. We see critics and reviewers still holding an important place in the media experience because of new media. The second position, which I want to interrogate in this essay, was that criticism needed to resolve the issue of disinterest. At the turn of the century, two factions were forming in the critical community. One, best represented by Arlene Croce's review of Bill T. Jones's dance piece "Still/Here." In this review, Croce admits she refused to see "Still/Here" because it was not proper art, but rather "victim art," which placed it beyond the scope of criticism. She reasons that the political project invoked in "Still/Here" delegitimizes the work because it demands its viewers respond in a sort of way. This demand, Croce reasons, would prevent her from any sort of objective criticism. Croce's attack on what she sees as victim art necessarily prompted equal pushback from critics, like Joyce Carol Oats, who argued that the very notion of victim art that Croce forwards is insulting to the experience captured in art like "Still/Here." All it takes to undermine Croce's stance is to offer up any of an incredibly numerous examples of art representing personal tragedy. Joyce Carol Oats is able to offer examples from nearly every major artistic medium in Western culture over the last 200 years. Yet, even though Croce's argument is easy to logically undercut, it does not resolve the larger conflict over the role of disinterest in art and criticism. Disinterest here means a focus only on the aesthetic experience of art. A critic like Croce would suggest that art should only be interested in the aesthetic experience being offered to consumers and not any other political or economic project. This is the Neoclassical position and has been championed by Western critics and reviewers for centuries. This attitude towards art favors works that triumph the virtues of specific tastes, as outlined by the ancient Greeks. But, obviously, we are no longer living in a Classical or Neoclassical age, but an information and computer-mediated age. The difference is important. In an uninformed society, such as those that established and embraced Neoclassical ideals, there was no imperative to recognize and acknowledge because of the limitations on the flow of information. However, now that social media and other networked platforms have connected us and in turn exposed us to those beyond our immediate existence, we have the ethical imperative to pay attention to society. This imperative, I argue, extends to art as well. Art, in as much as it is the means through which we represent our experiences for the larger community, must also pay attention. Of course, that paying attention can come in different forms. There are going to be works like Jones's "Still/Here" that make a polarizing and emotionally charged project central to the art. But, there are also going to be works like the Ghostbusters reboot that make what should be rather undisruptive projects, such as gender equality, background elements of the art. In these cases, the project impacts the creation of the work, but not its substance - think of how casting impacts the production, but not the content of a film. Works that look out and respond to contemporary social life are not violating some pure artistic code, as Croce might claim. Instead, they push the artistic code forward in such a way as to catch up with the advances made by other media in the Internet age. When art is interested in society, whether that interest is front-and-center or behind the scenes at the production level, the work should not be rejected outright by critics, as Croce does with "Still/Here" and has started to happen again and again. The more recent cases, framed as protests and boycotts pervert the Croce's position. Croce would not, I believe, argue that you should not go see Star Wars or Ghostbusters because the casts are not comprised of nearly all white males. However, the insistence that art be disinterested can and has been weaponized for the culture war that has slowly been seeping into more mainstream pockets of social life over the last few years. The notion that movies should stay out of politics simply cannot be an apolitical statement anymore. In an age when everyone is a critic and everyone has a responsibility to witness and acknowledge injustice, then the critical demand for disinterest is as much a political demand for the status quo as it is an aesthetic preference for tradition. Therefore, I want to extend a thoughtful challenge to everyone who reads this essay to think about your critical position. Can we separate it from the other identities and lifestyles we are working on curating and presenting? Can we separate our politics from those identities and lifestyles? If we can't, then I recommend that we all pay a little extra attention to what music, books, movies, podcasts, video games, etc. that we brush off automatically. Maybe we will find a piece of art that exhilarates us or substantially alters our perceptions.